X and Fluxbox :: Status Report Intel D201GLY and DSL 4.1 (video)

Hi,

Haven't seen any other postings on the Intel D201GLY in the DSL forums, so thought I would share my experiences.

If the D201GLY is an unknown board to you, the basics is that it is an Intel MB with a Celeron chip soldered in with SIS North/South Bridges. It comes in two forms: V1 is PATA only and runs with a faster (but hotter) CPU that requires a fan. V2 appears to be more desirable as it is fanless and includes two SATA plugs. The boards use the SIS 662 (mirage 1) video chip and includes one memory slot (up to 1gb) and one PCI slot. Not bad for $70-$80!

The good news is that DSL 4.1 boots and runs X with no problem! The Vesa Video driver works fine (if you like unaccelerated video and accept horizontally stretched display on a wide screen LCD). I have not confirmed Audio, but have not seen any problems reported for other distros.

The challenge is getting an accelerated video driver to work with DSL. The standard sis driver included with the DSL XFree86 packages only partially works for me (1680x1050 - 22inch) - I get a lot of horizontal lightning. (This appears to be a performance issue, see for example: http://www.winischhofer.eu/linuxsispart1.shtml#13 )

The ubuntu folks seem to have been the most successful here. See:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=463077

They have found a copy of the original Intel drivers for RH, and have found that SuSE 10.2 also includes them.

Probably the most promising (at least as reported on the ubunto forum above), are the "premium" sis drivers released by Dr. Thomas Winischhofer. See:

http://www.winischhofer.eu/linuxsispart4.shtml#download

The ubuntu folks have had good luck rebuilding the drivers for X11R7 from x.org. (See build instructions at:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=463077&page=4

The remaining question is whether this code can be made to work with the XFree 4.3 we use. I am going to give it a try... If anybody else has been down this path, please let me know.

Mark

Just a note: Vesa can use widescreen resolutions too.
Check with "Xvesa -listmodes", if it lists 1680x1050x your bit depth, it can be used, both as framebuffer console and X resolution..

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, listmodes for the sis662 only comes back with 4:3 sizes e.g. 1600x1200 and 1280x1024,etc.

For some reason my Chimei 22 accepts that resolution, just is clear that it is not the "preferred" 1680x1050. :-(

Tried the "-force" option with 1680x1050, that didn't do anything.

Now in the middle of trying to compile the driver, and of course, the configure file assumes x.org... :-(

Mark

What about the newest "free" drivers in http://www.winischhofer.eu/linuxsispart4.shtml#download ? There's binary downloads so you don't even have to compile it.

For the configuring, always read the README/INSTALL/etc files, and ./configure --help can also be of help.

Of course you could always use xorg instead, but I suppose you're trying to use xf430 for a reason.

Hi,

Actually, I have no particular reason to try to remain with the xf4.3.0 release... (although the binary provided by the link above was a small improvement over the sis driver provided with xf 4.3.0).

So tonight, I actually tried the xorg 7.2 uci that you have made available in the testing area. (Thanks!)

My plan "A" was that the SIS driver with 7.2 would be a notch better. Unfortunately, the horizontal lightning still remained.

My plan "B" was to try to wedge in the sis driver the ubuntu people had built for xorg 7.2. Unfortunately, that plan also died because they used a newer gcc that required glibc 2.4.

So plan "C" is to rebuild the latest premium driver. However, in re-reading Winishhofer's notes on building the standard driver from source, it looks like I will need to set up a whole 7.2 source tree, and then slam his driver source in the appropriate SIS directory. I will have to think about that one a little...

Mark

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