iB::Topic::TI-Extensa 450 Video Settings

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Topic: TI-Extensa 450 Video Settings, Only Getting 640x480/4-Bit Color

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Scarletdown Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 13
Joined: Sep. 2004

Posted: Sep. 14 2004,17:49

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

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.

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?

Scarletdown Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 13
Joined: Sep. 2004

Posted: 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?