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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

BL2 loadlin Xvesa and svgalib did not work on this computer - Illegal 
instruction - unless I first actually displayed an image with a viewer in 
DOS such as display, pictview, qv or sea3.  BL2 Xvesa is from Delilinux.

I have not been able to reproduce the Xvesa/svgalib problem again in 
linux, in BL3 (2-floppy or ext2) or BL2, with Steven's or Delilinux Xvesa.
It is very predictable in DOS (greyscale until I display an image with one 
of four viewers).

I seem to have an intermittent video problem - maybe it cured itself in 
linux?  (But not in DOS).  This is the computer with bad onboard floppy 
controller and intermittently bad onboard primary slave controller (master 
is fine all the time).

So I suspect something in the motherboard, not the video card, is slowly 
going bad.  Maybe someone will give us another 500MHz computer soon, now 
that freshmen are supposed to have at least 1 GHz for writing homework.

Does anyone know what part of the hardware on the motherboard is used with 
video?

On Sat, 9 Jul 2005, sindi keesan wrote:

> I have an S3 Trio3D AGP video card (4MB RAM, VESA 2.0) which worked fine
> in another computer.  This computer has PCI ethernet and scsi cards, ISA
> modem and ISA/pnp sound (Awe64) and a jumpered ISA I/O card to replace the
> bad floppy controller and bad primary IDE controller (the master part was
> okay, the slave intermittent).  It is 533MHz and sometimes freezes up when
> I try to go into CMOS setup.  It took a lot of juggling of IRQs with
> ctcu/ctcm, and BIOS setup, to get sound to work in linux (at which point I
> cannot play .wav files in DOS - which requires IRQ9 to play wav, but plays
> midis okay with irq5).
>
> When I run the following DOS programs they display not in the usual color
> but in grey and white:
> syschk
> SB16's diagnose or ctcu
> vuimg image viewer
>
> Compushow gives a runtime error 200
>
> lxpic displays properly in color.
> So do 'display', pictview (both freeware), qv (quicktime viewer) and sea3,
> and after using any of these four programs, the other programs that were
> displaying grey also display properly in color.
>
> In linux, I was getting 'illegal' messages when I tried to use any
> svgalib program (zgv, links2 from delilinux) or Xvesa until I fixed this
> problem in DOS.
>
> To fix it in DOS, I put a line at the end of autoexec.bat
> pictview image.jpg
>
> When I boot, I hit the ESC key to get back to a prompt instead of an
> image.
>
>
> The grey problem occurred before I put in the I/O card.  In CMOS I set
> IRQ14 and 3 to ISA not pnp.  BIOS lists only the sound card as pnp.  It
> finds the modem at IRQ9 but ctcm later changes this.  IRQ9 is used in
> conjunction with IRQ2 somehow as 'cascade' and is not available in linux.
>
> Is there some better way to fix this problem?  Maybe even one that does
> not require DOS, or is it DOS that is causing the problem?  (I should try
> booting with 2-floppy BL3 to check this).
>
> So this is a completely different type of XVESA problem that also affects
> svgalib.
>
>
>
> keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
> SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
> _______________________________________________
> BasLinux mailing list
> BasLinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org