Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

Lee Forrest wrote:
> No. Nor does kill PID or switching to tty1 and shutting down the
> xserver with ^C, or anything like that. No matter what I do,
> it kills the tty and I have reboot.

This is one of the "fish hooks" that Steven mentioned. Xvesa does not
always behave correctly when you ask it to shut down.

> Because the getty on tty2 won't allow me to login (takes username
> but not password) I have to reboot. That getty doesn't work at
> all, by the way. I can't switch to it with Ctrl-Alt-F2 and login,
> ever.

Lee, can you show us your /etc/inittab and passwd (edited if
necessary)? The passwd add-on worked perfectly for me, so we need more
information to track down this problem (if indeed you want to solve
it).

Now, about your problem displaying images. I switched my Xvesa to
4-bit color and experienced problems (with xli) similar to what you
have described. I think I may have a solution. Get and install
http://keesan.freeshell.org/bl/netpbm-10.26.7.libc5.tgz. (1.6MB, but
this method only uses about 200K of stuff from it. You can delete the
remainder.) Then use this command sequence to convert your image:

jpegtopnm file_name_here.jpg | ppmdither -red 2 -green 2 -blue 2 | \
ppmtobmp >/tmp/1.bmp
xli /tmp/1.bmp

The result of the above sequence was _much_ better than what xli alone
provided, in my testing. This method uses netpbm to dither (reduce
colors) of the image, and netpbm's dithering is more complex/robust
than xli's.

If the detail is now visible, but the colors are off, try starting
Xvesa with the
"-swaprgb" option.

If you like the results, I suggest that you experiment with the above
sequence. For example, the following will scale the image down first
if it is too large to fit on the screen:

jpegtopnm /hd/craterla/picture0.jpg | pnmscale .4 | ppmdither -red 2
-green 2 -blue 2 | ppmtobmp >/1.bmp

You can also use the pngtopnm in the above package to convert PNGs
into a format usable with xli.

Did you try very low resolution, high color depth combinations in
/etc/Xconfig? e.g. 320x240x16 or 640x480x16? If you still want a large
Xserver, I suggest looking through here:
http://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/4.6.0/binaries/Linux-ix86-libc5/

They have libc5 binaries for several new versions of X. Large
packages, but you should be able to delete what you don't need.

David