Baslinux mailing list

[baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org]

> Our only computer that would take a 1.0GHz Intel cpu has onboard i810 and
> no AGP slot.  The PCI Rendition video card (that worked perfectly in
> another computer which has i810 onboard) gives odd error messages with
> Xvesa and also turns highlighted text invisible in CMOS setup.  Xvesa
> works with a PCI ATI card but we have Win98 on the same computer and
> cannot find the right ATI driver, despite downloading some monstrosity
> that should include all RAGE drivers for all versions of Windows.  The
> temporary solution is to use onboard i810 with Win98 (4MB driver worked)
> and switch to PCI card in BIOS to use linux with the ATI card but my
> partner does not like doing this.

Xvesa works with i810 up to 800x600 16-bit (or 1024 256-bit in odd colors) 
which is tolerable, but the svgalib i810 libvga only does 640 resolution 
or less. I use svgalib-based zgv to view images, svp to view pdf files, 
and links -g if I need to view website inline images.  Lee was so opposed 
to svgalib that he never discovered this.  Maybe agpgart will help svgalib 
too?

X_SVGA should in theory work for 1024 resolution 8-bit.  agpgart was 
suggested for use with it.  It is supposed to make better use of memory 
(maybe increasing it from 1MB to the 4MB used by Windows) which I will try 
to compile.  If it works, no need for the i810 X server, which works with 
kernel 2.4 or later.

i810 does not support linear framebuffer, meaning we get only 80 col 25 
lines unless we can get other non-framebuffer modes, which tend to be 
quite unstable.  So I will keep hunting for the ATI Windows driver.

Sindi