Baslinux mailing list

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

On Sun, 29 Jan 2006, David Moberg wrote:

> sindi keesan wrote:
> > The libc5 xfbdev is nearly 1MB, and the two glibc files add another 110K.
> > Would it be smaller statically compiled against uclibc
>
> It would be about 50k smaller than the BL3 Xvesa -- Xfbdev = Xvesa -
> libvesa.a + libfb.a? Anyway, the code to talk to the Linux framebuffer
> driver is smaller than code to try to get a VESA BIOS to behave.
>
> > and is this something I might be able to do?
>
> X is tricky to compile. You can try it if you want, but you'll need to
> download a lot of source code. I may try sometime later.
>
> > Did you somehow compile statically against libc.so.5?
>
> I appear to have linked it somehow with libc.a (static) instead of
> libc.so.5. I don't know how this happened... perhaps I accidently
> stripped libc and therefore removed the symbols from it that were
> needed to compile so gcc used libc.a instead.

Maybe you could make a completely static libc5 version, if not a static 
uclibc version, so we would not need to add libm.so.5 and ld-linux-so.1 to 
BL2.

 >
> > I don't recall any crashes with 2.2.16, with Tseng video card (which
> > crashes with Xvesa).
>
> Did you try switching consoles while X was running? It might
> have been a problem with my hardware.

I will try this soon.  I have two Tseng cards that crash with Xvesa, do 
only 8-bit color with SVGA X, but work fine with xfbdev (not at 1280 
because of the 8-bit color limitation and they have only 2M video RAM).
I will put back libm.so.5 and ld-linux on those two computers.

Because I am sort of stuck using xfbdev on these two computers, I would 
appreciate if someone could get fbset to work so I can choose resolutions 
of X.  I use the Tseng cards because they are PCI and my AGP cards won't 
collaborate with my MGA cards (to use TTL monitor as second monitor). 
David compiled an fbset and there is also one in busybox 1.01 as compiled 
with glibc and neither of them do anything for me except display current 
mode or other possible modes - they don't switch resolutions.

A stopgap measure is when browsing to use Opera's zoom feature to get more 
on a page if I encounter a 1280 website and am in 800 mode so I can read 
the framebuffer text.

> David