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Topic: Running X on an old ThinkPad..., Trying to figure out XIO: Error 104

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Iain

Group: Members
Posts: 5
Joined: June 2006

Posted: June 15 2006,05:13

Hi all... post # 1

I spent all of $35 on a ThinkPad 755CX:

Pentium 75
24 MB memory
Video chip is WD90C24

DSL is installed to the hard drive. I've tried all flavors of xsetup, but on running "startx" always get:

X10: fatal error 104

xinit does this with ANY parameters I pass, valid or otherwise

Hunh? After many nights googling, I found this:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/WD90C24

...which says:

"This chip is not supported by X.org, the best you can get is 640x480 with 16 colors with the 'vga' driver as part of the X.Org distribution".

Well - I had tried Debian on this same machine: while the perf running X was dreadful (unsurprisingly) DID run. But... this used XFree86 I believe, which does have some driver support.

So it looks like I need to set up the vga driver as mentioned above, but I don't know:

- if its even included in DSL
- if it isn't, how I should install it

Basic 640x480 and 16 colors would be just fine with me - its a great old laptop, the network connection is excellent via PCMCIA 802.11, and I'd love to keep it going.

I'm going to continue with my research, but if anyone could suggest some helpful hints, I would appreciate it greatly!

Regards,

-Iain

kerry

Group: Members
Posts: 706
Joined: April 2006

Posted: June 15 2006,08:02

Well you can try and install the Xfree86.dsl and set it up like this->
http://www.angelfire.com/nt/sucks/XF86Config.html

It does say it supports vesa and dsl uses xvesa.
You've tried the 800x600 in all modes(8,16,24,32)? How about vga=normal?

hs7sv

Group: Members
Posts: 247
Joined: June 2005

Posted: June 15 2006,08:32

This thread may be helpful. Good luck

--------------
"My advice is to just return hardware that does not work with a plain Linux kernel, right to the place where you bought it, and ask for your money back..."

Klaus Knopper

skaos

Group: Members
Posts: 430
Joined: April 2004

Posted: June 15 2006,10:35

You can use 'Xvesa -listmodes' (without quotes) to check which vesa 2.0 modes your card supports. Also, how do you boot? - I seem to remember that you will get this error message if you boot with loadlin and have some TSR's, drivers etc. loaded in ms-dos.

Iain

Group: Members
Posts: 5
Joined: June 2006

Posted: June 16 2006,01:34

Thanks so much for your replies - three new avenues to try

I haven't yet tried 800x600 in all modes...
Didn't know about "listmodes" !!
...and in the end, I may try the alternate DSL install in the link; XFree86 most certainly did include support for my video chip, so I'm not done yet!

...not even if I hve to bug into xinit to find out the source of the error!

I'll keep you posted...

Regards,

-Iain

11 replies since June 15 2006,05:13

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