screen resolution problem

Forum: Laptops
Topic: screen resolution problem
started by: ckx

Posted by ckx on April 04 2006,20:33

I've installed DSL on an old IBM Thinkpad 310ED laptop with a 166Mhz MMx processor and 32M of RAM. Pretty amazing that it works at all perhaps. However, my question is about screen resolution. The thinkpad runs Win98 at 800x600x8 but I can only get DSL to work properly at 640x480x16. DSL will run at 800x600 but the colors are wrong, I think I'm getting only red and green. The icons don't show up on the desktop either. Changing the number of colors has no effect. Running Xvesa shows just a 640x480x16 button and that works well enough. I'd like a slightly larger screen though if possible. Any suggestions?

Posted by doobit on April 04 2006,20:35

I guess I need to get one of those old IBMs so I can experiment.

Posted by andrewb on April 05 2006,00:09

Have you looked at:

< http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Vga%3Dxxx >

??

Posted by MDG on April 05 2006,11:25

Hi CKX!
I too have an IBM Thinkpad 310ED (but ran WIN95). So far I have had the same results as you 640x480x16. I did find a keyboard combo to help with windows that open too big - if you hold down the Alt key and press and hold the Right mouse button you can resize the window. Then when you need to center up the window hold down the Alt key again and press the Left mouse button and you can move the whole window. I'm not sure how you tell all windows what size you want them.

Did you have any luck setting up sound? - I got nothin.

I'm anxious to hear all your results - - I'm really amazed DSL runs on this old laptop

Posted by ckx on April 06 2006,19:49

Quote (andrewb @ April 04 2006,20:09)

Have you looked at:

< http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Vga%3Dxxx >

??

I tried running Xvesa -listmodes as the page suggests, just in a terminal window, not starting up in runmode. This indicates that 800x600x8 and 1024x768x8 should be options, using the vga codes shown under F3 at boot. But the vga cheatcodes don't seem to have an effect if I run Xvesa and I can't run xfbdev on this machine, it freezes up.

Just checked, running xsetup.sh and selectin xfbdev causes an error:

modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module fb0
XIO: fata IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on Xserver ":0:0"
after 0 requests (o known processed) with 0 events remaining.

I exited the window manager, ran xsetup.sh with xfbdev as xserver, then ran xstart. Xvesa works fine though.

Posted by ckx on April 06 2006,19:54

Quote (MDG @ April 05 2006,07:25)

No luck with sound, I still haven't looked at that. Do you have networking btw? They told me at a store that today's pc cards won't work on my antique. Then again, they showed me a very nice refurbished machine at a low, low price, so I'm suspicious.

Posted by MDG on April 10 2006,02:42

Hi!

I'd be suspicious too! LOL If you are talking a regular network setup - should not be a problem. If you are talking wireless, could be a problem. Wifi - hey that would be cool, but I would be surprised if that could be setup, but then again, anything is possible.

I've seen some posts about using Xfree86 - I'm on dialup so downloading will take a while, but I would like to try it.

Messed up on my frugal install and forgot to specify where to put mydsl - if I could figure out which file that is stored in, I would edit it - but not that knowledgeable yet.

Hope to hear from you soon!

MG

Posted by andrewb on April 10 2006,04:28

What were the hex numbers at the start of the 800x600x8 and 1024x768x8 lines?

You need to put dsl in front of the vga=xxx option in the boot line (i.e. dsl vga=808). When you do this you don't need any of the fbnnnXmmm cheatcodes.

I had no end of trouble with an old IBM 755C that worked OK 640x480 in windoze, but just would not run with linux. It was one of the WD90C24 chips. It wiull run with XFree, but the overhead of that was killing the machine - only had 36Mb Max RAM & as it's only a 486 it couldn'tcope with all the swapping & still run at a decent pace.

Posted by ckx on April 11 2006,18:36

Quote (andrewb @ April 10 2006,00:28)

What were the hex numbers at the start of the 800x600x8 and 1024x768x8 lines?

I got 0x0103 for 800x600x8 and 0x0105 for 1024x768x8, which translate to 771 and 773 respectively, which is what F3 shows you at boot. I did get 800x600 but the colors are all garbled. Maybe I don´t have enough video memory. I might try Xfree but I´ll have to get networking working first

Posted by ckx on April 11 2006,18:39

Quote (MDG @ April 09 2006,22:42)

I bought a wireless card and it works fine -- under win98. I´ve tried to get it to work in DSL using ndiswrap but no luck so far. But that´s another forum.

Posted by andrewb on April 11 2006,23:42

Hmmmmmmm......

I see the 310 uses the C&T chipset rather than the WD one, but it still has the dual scan monitor. It may be that the chipset is not fully vesa compatible & so doesn't work with Linux properly. There are some reoprts on the net elsewhere of people using SciTechh's Display Doctor in DOS (http://www.3dgamers.com/utils/) to set the framebuffer mode & then use Loadlin to start linux from DOS. I can't really see how this is supposed to work as it relies on a DOS TSR (terminate & stay resident). When Linux is booted it will overwrite all the DOS TSR's anyway. Display Doctor is worth getting to check out whether your system supports framebuffers & what vesa version the BIOS has, though getting them working under linux can be a long, frustrating job with (in my experience) often no positive outcome.

On your system XFREE will use up a lot of RAM, though with the new mods to recent versions of DSL to use some of the swap as ramdisk you may have more success, but it won't be as fast as using the xvesa or xfbdev drivers.

Good Luck!