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

I have two Tseng ET4000 pci video cards which I was testing with David's 
framebuffer kernel on two computers that are dual-head (they have MGA card 
with TTL monitor and VGA card with VGA monitor).  They both worked 
consistently in their two computers.  Xvesa often crashed on exit.  X 
worked on one not the other.  On the card where X did not ever work (I 
tried all sorts of fixes) I was trying out xfbdev.  Dosemu worked, but 
dosemu -V switched back out of framebuffer text mode.  It exited okay.

When I switched from vt3 (VGA xfbdev) to vt4 (plain text) vt3 exited 
itself from X back to CLI.
When I switched from vt3 (xfbdev) to vt1 (MGA) the xfbdev screen lost all 
of its color but kept the outlines of icewm and rxvt.  I could no longer 
use the two VGA terminals (which is common when I get crashes with fb or 
resizecons).

I also played with resizecons while in fb mode and I think it crashed 
interestingly, forgot the details.

We then put the Tseng card that won't do X into another computer, where it 
is working as expected (after some kernel panics becuase it has onboard 
AGP and I forgot we have to set onboard ram to 2M for a while in the 
process of switching).

We put the 'better' Tseng card into this computer where the other Tseng 
card was.

I booted into DOS and got lots of flashing characters all over the screen 
and saw nothing on the VGA screen.  Booted to linux and it got as far as a 
line about ide1.  Rebooted to DOS, more upper ascii - a small square full 
in upper right corner, lots of flashing.   Typed mode co80 - "function 
co80 not supported on this computer".  (So it is probably not the monitor 
or video card causing the problem).

What part of the computer normally supports co80 (VGA)?  BIOS?  Some other 
chip onboard?  I have had computers where MGA did not work, but I never 
lost VGA.

Can using framebuffer do this sort of damage to a computer?  I don't see 
how the old card could have damaged the new one.

I will try a different (maybe old ISA) video card that I don't care about, 
as a test, in case the board has damaged this new card.

Luckily we just got two more P1 computers working today so we could test 
out USB in them, and I can move the drives etc. to one of them that boots 
from zip100 drive, if I have messed up this computer.  I never tried some 
of these framebuffer experiments before.

The text looks a lot nicer in framebuffer mode, and I don't get the 
problems associated with resizecons (which only works properly in 80x30 or 
80x34 and maybe 28, otherwise you lose lines top and bottom and the cursor 
goes haywire).  But I could learn to use different font sizes in X.