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My DELL Latitude LM M166ST 166MHz 96MB RAM laptop has ESS1688 sound which, 
like the 100MHz Toshiba 420CDT with ESS688, also works as sb with the 
BL3.50 P1 kernel.  (I did not try it with my 2.4.31 kernel).  io=0x220 
irq=5 dma=1.  Setup does not offer alternatives.

play-mp3 and sox play worked.  mcdp would require replacing fd with cd 
drive.

playmidi tells me it cannot open /dev/sequencer.  Not important.  Will try 
timidity some day.

The Toshiba has Chips and Technology ct6555 video (so do the Compaq 
Armadas, I think) which works perfectly with Xvesa, xfbdev, and the SVGA X 
server (using my laptop XF86Config, with refresh and syn rates modified 
from Steven's XF86Config).  2MB video RAM.

The DELL (and a Gateway) both have A20 line problems (cold reboot fixes 
the DELL) and Neomagic video.  DELL has MagicGraph 128 V/ZV 40K SVGA BIOS 
with 1MB RAM and scrawny text.  The Gateway has either scrawny text or 
small text (depends on BIOS setting).

Crashes to vertical pink and purple stripes with Xvesa.
Crashes with SVGA X server, lots of numbers and an error message.

Slackware 4.0 (XFree86 3.3.3.1) has video support for
Neomagic 2200 2160 2097 2093 2090 2070.  This is 2090 or 2093.
I don't know what the server is called - it is not listed for SVGA.

So I tried framebuffer X instead.  It is 1/3 the size of SVGA server and 
occupies less than 1/3 the memory, like Xvesa.  It does not need 
XF86Config.

This laptop works with my 2.4.31 (bzimlsbf.431) and 2.2.16 (zimage.fsm) 
kernels, except that if you boot into framebuffer mode, with vga=788 at 
the end of the loadlin line (for 800x600x16 - 785 is 640 and 791 is 1024), 
svgalib programs no longer work.  zgv displays the file selector images in 
four narrow copies side by side.

After booting to framebuffer mode, you get nicer looking text instead of 
the scrawny stuff, and xfbdev X server works (in BL2) with icewm, opera, 
xv, xpdf.  (I should test in BL3).  This is the only X server I got 
working so far.  It is 100K larger than Xvesa and requires libm.so.5 (you 
can add that to BL2).

Framebuffer and svgalib appear to be incompatible, at least for this video 
chip.  I tried to test on two desktops but matrox and riva PCI video cards 
both crash badly with xfbdev.  They work fine with vesafb text.  I don't 
recall testing this combination on other laptops but Xvesa works on the 
Toshiba and has never caused svgalib problems.

I usually use svp (ghostsript based pdf/ps viewer) to view pdfs but the 
one I compiled needs svgalib.  In BL3 you can use a very old xpdf from sw4 
or the latest pdftoppm from xpdf, and view that with xv (or xli?).

links2 for BL3 works under X but not in BL2. (Delilinux links2 for 
glibc is not ssl, and the ssl version I compiled is not for X).
Therefore BL3 is the perfect solution for this computer, but only with a 
framebuffer kernel.

Steven, could you compile a framebuffer 2.2.26 kernel?  Better yet, 2.2.27 
kernel with all the modules, to avoid machine check exception problems on 
some laptops of the BL age.

Sindi Keesan