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

We have two computers with onboard video that does not do vesafb 
framebuffer despite being VESA 3.0, and have only 1MB video ram, so we 
need to replace the video.  There are no AGP slots.  Most PCI cards don't 
do framebuffer.  (Tseng and Matrox do but are somewhat screwy and we don't 
have extras).

We have several ATI RAGE PCI cards that do framebuffer but not Xvesa, or 
Xvesa but not framebuffer.  An Emachine with ATI Rage IIc where Xvesa (or 
X SVGA) only works if you boot with lilo.  A Compaq with Rage LT Pro that 
works with X SVGA server and loadlin, but not Xvesa.  ATIs are all 
different and most are not very standard or vesa-compatible.  But they 
made lots of PCI cards and onboard video chips.

The neighbor gave us something that does framebuffer (vesafb, with any of 
my or David's framebuffer-capable kernels, on the loadlin line or in 
lilo.conf, where adding vga=791 gives you 1024 res text mode).  We have 
one other similar card.

They also do Xvesa but you cannot then switch to any text console or exit 
Xvesa without the text getting badly scrambled (large colored letters 
strewn across the screen).

So I took the xfbdev from a package David Moberg compiled, noted that it 
needs libm.so.5, copied both files to BL2 and xfbdev to BL3, and these 
both work at the resolution selected at boot time, and they also work 
instantly (they load much faster than Xvesa).  They don't crash on exit. 
Only drawback is I don't know how to switch resolutions after booting.

in /etc/profile or /root/.profile:

alias x='xinit -- /usr/local/bin/xfbdev'

I am running vesafb at 1024 resolution.

This brings up icewm if you have an .xinitrc file and xinit.   You need 
the full path to xfbdev, otherwise you get something with 4 colors at 640 
res that crashes on exit just like Xvesa does.  (Similarly, you would need
xinit -- /usr/X11R6/bin/Xvesa to run Xvesa with icewm).

I set up an alias x12 for Xvesa at 1280 resolution so we can view photos 
with Xvesa before rebooting to use CLI mode again.

There is also an XFBDEV X server which is much larger than xfbdev.  I have 
not tried the SVGA X server with these cards.

I recommend xfbdev for a quick solution to ATI cards that work with vesafb 
and crash exiting Xvesa or don't do Xvesa at all.  They need to be at 
least VESA 2.0 to support fb and not all 2.0 cards support fb.

How does one properly use aty128fb.o?  I can load it but the resolution 
does not change.  I tried loading it with video=aty128fb:800x600 on the 
insmod line or the loadlin line, ditto with vga=

Matrox works insmodding with vesa=791 but that was not in the 
documentation for aty128fb.  video= was.

vesafb uses vga=791 on loadlin line


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