Laptops :: Colors and resolution in Compaq Armada 1530

My 1520 works with Xvesa with 4 bit color only, no icons, no sound, but the GUI is viewable just fine with the 'minimal' desktop theme. However, with only 4 bit color depth, you can not use Dillo and other apps that require more than 4 bit colors. Emelfm and the GUI FTP thing work fine. If I could just get Dillo to work, I would stop complaining.

I tried xfree86 to no avail. I even cheated and found a few Config-4 files on the net and tried to use them. Ah, but the sweet smell of failure prevails.....

Have a look at:
http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....;t=9015

It may be that there is a particular (undocumentd) vga mode that will work. I had a lot of trouble with coloured & garbled displays on a libretto, but now it is running grrrrrrrrrrrrreat with DSL! It may be that using the method I'vve described you can get your laptop running without having to revert to xfree.

This sounds very interesting. I will give at try when I get some time.
Thank you.

I have an Armada 1530 too, and I couldn't get framebuffering to work properly. And the laptop is not really VESA compatible (as you've discovered).

The answers to your prayers are here
clicky

You either need to amend the XF86Config file provided (as below), or download the one for the cirrus logic graphics board.

Essentially make sure that you remove the 1024x768 mode, and remove all the entries from the "Screen" (or is it display? - it's near the bottom anyway) section that refer to better than 8bpp colour or better than 800x600. (should leave you with only one section - 8bpp, 800x600 and 640x480)

It doesn't matter if the board name is not right - the XF86_SVGA program will work out what board you have by itself.
If you want to see what it can handle use the command XF86_SVGA -probeonly from the command line (ie when X is not running)
and it will tell you what boards XF86_SVGA can talk to, and (how spiffy) what YOUR board is, and what it can handle.

Sorry I can't be absolutely specific, my internet connection is at work, but the laptop is at home.

Anyway, I did as instructed, and X works lovely at 256 colours. Except...
If you open a hi-colour application, like Mozilla Firefox or Dillo, the colours will go funny (I remember this laptop doing odd things with colours in Internet Explorer on Win98 too). Do not worry though. Whichever application is selected (has the focus) will have the right colours, and when you switch away from that application, your desktop will regain the right colours. A bit disconcerting, but certainly more useful than the orange, black and puce colours that kept appearing using Xvesa.

I haven't tried the xmodmap commands (to get the keyboard working), but it looks as though I'll need to - although the rest of my keys work properly (and to the UK layout) - backspace can misbehave. I'm going to play with it tonight.

A couple of addendums....
I can't get the desktop / wallpaper / icons to appear. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

I've done a full HD install. Works fine - although GRUB complained the first time I installed - I ignored the error and it went away.

Installed Openoffice (1.1.5) properly (from their tar.gz binary), and although sluggish, it is perfectly usable. Turn off some of the automatic helpers to speed you up - like the assistant or whatever it's called. Nice big swap partition is needed if you'll be doing complicated things though. Just opening Writer barely scratched SWAP, but I expect if you have charts and gizmos and pretty pictures that'll change.

My CNet SinglePoint CardBus ethernet card worked fine. The lights didn't light up (like they do on windows), and there were no silly noises (again unlike windows) to confirm a hotplug event, but I ran the network card setup, and hey presto, spangly network connection (well I could SSH my Fedora box!). I seem to remember, however, if you leave the card in at boot-time, the boot can freeze.

Finally, If you've any idea how I can persuade the X server to accept connections tunneled thru SSH (I know you need the -X switch in SSH) - ie to display X applications from my desktop PC, I'd be most grateful. To be honest, this'd be better in another thread - so I may start one.

PS. SHould have mentioned mine's upgraded to 48Mb RAM, so you might want to skip openoffice on 32Mb (there'll be a lot more swapping, and associated loss of peformance)

Just wanted to show that it is possible, and feasible, to use Linux just like Windows on this PC, with similar capabilities. (at least in terms of a normal desktop PC). I wanted to get it running again so I could access my documents on the move, and since the office currently has more occupants than PCs, I might use it as a backup PC for the office.

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