Video problems: Micron TransPort XKE

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Video problems: Micron TransPort XKE
started by: jsd

Posted by jsd on Dec. 04 2005,02:10

Hi there. I've got a fairly old Micron laptop that I'm trying to set up with DSL for a friend.

lspci says that the VGA controller is "Neomagic Corporation NM2160 (MagicGraph 128XD)"

I can only get it to work in framebuffer mode. Is it possible to use vesa? When I start it with vesa the screen is sort of visible but the whole thing is colored green and it looks like half of the pixels are missing/overlapping. Hard to explain. It would be great if it could work because I can tell that window scrolling is much faster/smoother in vesa than framebuffer. Also I can't get framebuffer to work from a Hard Disk boot. It only works from a CD boot. (I posted a separate thread about this in the HD INstall board.)

thanks!

Posted by mirekmal on Dec. 31 2005,10:44

I do have old Dell Latitude XPI with the same graphics chipset and exactly the same issue. Finally I managed to properly boot DSL using floppy boot (this laptop does not boot from CD) following these steps:
1 - at the boot prompt enter: dsl xsetup vga=788
2 - wait for xsetup to run
3 - choose xfbdev as display device
4 - choos USB or PS mouse and appropriate keyboard layout on following screens
5 - you will end up on prompt screen. Type startx to run X
and this is it. You should get proper screen 800x600 in 16 bit color depth. To get other color depth or resolution you need to change 788 in the first line to something different. You can figure out how to make in following article: < http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Framebuffer >

Posted by jsd on Dec. 31 2005,16:09

I gave up on DSL and went with FreeBSD6 which worked properly with my laptop "out of the box".