TI-Extensa 450 Video Settings

Forum: Laptops
Topic: TI-Extensa 450 Video Settings
started by: Scarletdown

Posted by Scarletdown on Sep. 06 2004,21:27

I've got DSL running on an ancient TI-Extensa 450 laptop that was given to me a few years ago. The only problem I am having so far is figuring out what driver to modprobe for the video. The onboard video is a Cirrus Logic CLGD6245, which is supposed to be able to do up to 800x600/256 Colors.

The best I can get however, is 640x480/16 Colors, and that is by selecting XVesa when I run xsetup.sh (Xfbdev doesn't work for some reason).

Over on this laptop's Windows for Workgroups side, I was also limited to 640x480/16 Colors until I installed the correct Win3x driver, and that at least gave me 640x480/256 Colors.

So, since I know that I can get 640x480/8-Bit color, how can I actually implement this on her DSL side? Dillo and Sylpheed look like total crappe in 16 color mode, and Dillo won't even run when I switch to 4-Bit color.

--
Scarletdown
Upholding the trailing edge of technology

Posted by skaos on Sep. 07 2004,10:15

Run 'Xvesa -listmodes' to see which modes Xvesa supports. If this doesn't show any 256 (8 bit) colour modes, your only option is to install and configure the full Xfree86 server (which hopefully supports your chip set).

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 07 2004,16:19

You can alsa try a different framebuffer mode and see if you can get it to boot up.

At the boot prompt, type:

dsl xsetup vga=xxx

where xxx is replaced by the number below originally provided by robf, for example 771:

640x480 - 256 colours: 769
640x480 - 32,768 colours: 784
640x480 - 65,536 colours: 785
640x480 - 16.8M colours: 786
800x600 - 256 colours: 771
800x600 - 32,768 colours: 787
800x600 - 65,536 colours: 788
800x600 - 16.8M colours: 789
1024x768 - 256 colours: 773
1024x768 - 32,768 colours: 790
1024x768 - 65,536 colours: 791 (default)
1024x768 - 16.8M colours: 792
1280x1024 - 256 colours: 775
1280x1024 - 32,768 colours: 793
1280x1024 - 65,536 colours: 794
1280x1024 - 16.8M colours: 795

If you can get one to work correctly, choose "xfbdev" on the xsetup menu and you are in business.

Good Luck.

Posted by Scarletdown on Sep. 13 2004,22:53

Quote (skaos @ Sep. 07 2004,06:15)

XVesa -listmodes shows only a few different 640x480 settings, with the best being 8-Bit "pseudocolor" (whatever that means). It also showed that I only have 384K of video RAM, despite the spec sheet on this laptop specifically stating that it comes with 512KB (the 384K was confirmed over on the Win 3.1 side of the system with the Cirrus Logic diagnostic tool). :angry:

So, it looks like I will be stuck with 640x480. I can live with that provided I can figure out how to configure certain apps to actually run in 640x480 mode. Many of them, such as TED, the file manager, Dillo, Pan, etc, seem to default to 800x600, so my menus and scrollbars are not visible on the screen and there is no way to access them.

Also, how do I change the color schemes for these apps. Blue text on a black background just doesn't work. I'd like to set them so that it is all just black text on a plain white or light grey background.

As for installing and configuring a full XFree86 server, I have no idea how to go about that. Can it be done with just a simple apt-get command?

Posted by skaos on Sep. 14 2004,10:39

8 bit colour means 256 colours, so you should be able to set it up with 256 colours (have no idea how to do it though). I think that you can set the window size of Dillo in a config file (.dillorc ?). And if the "450" in the name of your laptop means a 50 MHz 486, then your built in screen probably is 640x480.

Posted by Scarletdown on Sep. 14 2004,17:49

Quote (skaos @ Sep. 14 2004,06:39)

XVesa -listmodes said it was 8 Bit "pseudocolor", which I am guessing isn't a true 8-Bit color. In fact, here is a comparison of an 8-bit image as it appears on the Windows 3.1 side of the system, and the Linux side...

< http://webpages.charter.net/scarlet....ows.JPG >

< http://webpages.charter.net/scarlet....nux.JPG >

As you can see, the image, when viewed on the Linux side, looks like pure crappe in this so-called 256 color mode.

As for the specifications on this laptop...

The CPU is a 75MHz 486, and according to the user manual:

Page 11: All members of the Extensa 450 series are high performance notebooks powered by the 75MHz Intel DX4 processor...

512KB of Video RAM

And from page 46:

Supports panel resolutions up to 1280x1024, including 800x600 and 1024x768

So why then, am I not getting "real" 256 color mode on the Linux side, and why does XVesa -listmodes show only 384KB of VRAM when there should be 512KB?

Posted by Scarletdown on Sep. 28 2004,18:00

After deleting enough stuff to make room on the hard drive, I was able to apt-get install x-window-system.

I selected the cirrus driver during the setup process. However, I am unable to figure out how to actually get it to work. startx still loads the XVesa driver instead. What do I need to add to .xserverrc to load the cirrus driver?

I changed the first and only line in .xserverrc to read

exec /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/cirrus_drv -2button -screen 640x480x8 etc etc etc.

startx now fails with this error...

giving up
xinit: No such file or directory (errorno 2): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (erorno 3): Server error.

What else needs to be done to be able to make use of drivers other than XVesa and Xfbdev? Or, what can I do to force startx to not look first in ~/.xserverrc and actually look at the XF86Config file that was created when I installed X?

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 28 2004,22:10

Someone else figured this problem out already.

Try searching the forums for keyword "startx" and search all forums from the beginning or newer.

Posted by ke4nt1 on June 22 2005,23:15

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