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List:       suse-linux-e
Subject:    trident cyber 9385, thinkpad 760xl, xfree86-4.03, no joy
From:       dep <dennispowell () earthlink ! net>
Date:       2001-05-12 14:51:16
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greetings.

i've been through the docs, contacted installation support, and tried 
all the experiments i could think of, and still no luck. i'm hoping 
someone here can provide the crucial clue.

i installed suse 7.1 on a thinkpad 760xl, which because it has 
interchangeable floppy/cd drive, and cannot boot from the cd, 
required that i do the install by ftp from the cd in my desktop 
machine. this resulted in a yast1 console installation. the notebook 
id a p-II-166 w/104 megs; the vid system has a meg. the machine is 
four or five years old, and works fine at 800x600 with xfree86-3.3.6.

problem is, none of the xfree86-4.03 configurators (or any 
hand-edited /etc/X11/XF86Config i can come up with) works. suse 
install support suggested insertion of vga = 788 in lilo.conf (and of 
course rerunning /sbin/lilo), which takes, but on reboot it throws an 
error saying that 788 is invalid. which is to say that the machine 
doesn't support the kernel's vesa framebuffer stuff. which oughtn't 
matter -- on my desktop machine, an extensively hacked caldera 2.4, i 
start in rl3 all the time and get xfree 4.03 without vesa framebuffer 
support at all. i've updated the trident_drv.o from suse to no 
apparent effect, and i cannot find any reference to its requiring 
vesa framebuffers; indeed, in that the docs say it's accelerated it 
seems as if it cannot run with the vesa framebuffers, which disable 
acceleration.

attempting to start sax2 -m 0:trident renders a horribly trashed 
screen; xf86cfg blanks the screen, going into graphical mode, and at 
ctrl-alt-bksp renders errors that it cannot find any of my font 
paths.. xf86config produces the strange effect of a screen that 
switches to graphical mode and chugs along, even to the point of the 
kde startup music starting. problem is, the screen reflects none of 
this, having gone into graphical blank at startx and having remained 
blank thereafter. a check of the X log file tells me that there is no 
valid mode "800x600," which in fact is pretty much the *only* valid 
mode for this machine. it does not have pixel stretching, meaning 
that when things run at 640x480, they do so in a nice 640x480 box in 
the center of the screen. 

i've attempted to run sax2 -m 0:vga, which runs just fine; i've 
attempted thereafter to edit the resulting /etc/X11/XF86Config to 
reflect the proper driver instead of vga, but this has produced 
nothing useful.

for my own nefarious reasons, i'm eager to switch from 3.3.6 to 4.03. 
but i've hit the wall no matter what angle i've approached it from.

anyone with experience in this kind of thing who has the key to the 
clue box?

thanks.
-- 
dep
 
there's more to history than what's in books;
that's why it took so long to happen.

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