RobF
Group: Members
Posts: 22
Joined: July 2004 |
 |
Posted: July 21 2004,19:21 |
 |
I did search the DSL forums with any number of sensible search terms before I posted my inquiry here. There were reports of problems with TinyX servers (i.e. Xvesa and Xfbdev) and i810 but no fix that appears to apply to my situation. One or the other person was able to get their laptop to work with 800x600x16, others failed.
I did find one mode that works on my system (i.e. renders colors correctly), and that is 640x480x16 but that resolution is so low and the screen is stretched so much that on the startup Dillo screen the menu bar is not even on the screen so you can't close Dillo and can do absolutely nothing with DSL.
Feather Linux and Luit Linux have the same problem on my machine (they both use the same TinyX X-Windows servers as DSL), and Puppy Linux which I believe uses something slightly different also has problems. I'm surprised that this problem of incompatibility of these small Linux distros (and their compact non-X86Free X-windows servers) with the Intel integrated graphics chipsets (e.g. i810) isn't more widely acknowledged. This chipset must be as common as sand at the sea; every low end Dell contains it. Who knows how many people interested in DSL simply gave up when they got those horrible screens on their machines.
Here is a quote from Intel support at
http://support.intel.com/support/graphics/intel810/30483.htm#POS13
Does the vesafb frame-buffer module work on the Intel 810 and
Intel 815 Chipset Families?
No. The vesafb module can only make use of linear VESA modes. The
Intel 810 and Intel 815 chipset families use banked modes and
therefore, cannot boot into a frame-buffer. It would be possible
to add banked mode support to the vesafb driver, but as of yet
there are no plans to do so. The vga 16 color framebuffer
available in recent Linux kernels does function properly and can
be used in place of the vesafb framebuffer.
I also came across a discussion by the developers of LNX-BBC who decided against using Xfbdev as a default X server because they knew that every machine with the i810 in it would crash on bootup. E.g. "The kernel in bbc-2002-12-20T11:03:05 hangs on a machine with an i810
display adapter using the current default boot setting since the i810
chipset does not work with the VESA framebuffer."
On the Intel support site I also found the following which seems to be pertinent (as I posted before, I have the Intel 82845G/GL chipset graphics controller and the Xdriver is i810) :
Intel® 82845G Graphics Controller
VBE (VESA) support for DOS games and applications.
Solution:
The Intel® Extreme Graphics controllers support VBE 1.2, 2.0 and 3.0. Both linear and banked framebuffer modes are supported. This allows the use of full color and resolution DOS games and applications.
This also provides driver independent (fall-back) graphics support for other operating systems. For example, Windows XP will use VBE modes for display until the Intel® graphics driver is installed. XFree86* and most Linux* distributions also provide a VESA/VBE driver which is compatible with these graphics controllers.
What am I to make of all of that? I understand nothing about video on i386 machines. Can someone help me sort this out?
xfbdev doesn't seem to work at all with i810, is that correct? Can xvesa be made to work? Or can I install the X86Free X server? Somehow, DSL has got to be made to work with the i810 at good resolution and with correct color rendering.
Robert
|
.
DSL Market ,
Great VPS hosting provided by Tektonic
