RobF
Group: Members
Posts: 22
Joined: July 2004 |
 |
Posted: July 23 2004,05:33 |
 |
Whenever I referred to 16 in connection with color depth, I was referring to 16 bit color depth rather than 16 colors. I hardly tested the 4 bit mode (i.e. 16 colors) as I expected a pretty horrible outcome. When I run Mandrakelinux 10.0 or Xandros 2.0 or Libranet 2.8.1, I'm using 1024x768x16, i.e. >10,000 colors.
Anyway, re 800x600 at 4 bit with xfbdev. I have to repeat: when I use boot: fb800x600 (that's all, on the boot command line you cannot specify color depth), I still wind up in the "DSL X Setup" box which asks me to choose xvesa or xfbdev. When I choose xfbdev, the next box asks me: Do you have a USB mouse -> Yes, I click on Yes and bang, rather than going on to ask "what color depth", as it does when I choose Xvesa, the config program crashes and dumps me to the DSL command line, I never see an X Windows desktop. NO POSSIBLE SETUP OF XFBDEV HAS EVER GOTTEN ME TO AN X WINDOW.
Re 800x600 at 4 bit with xvesa. I tried that, and I get to the DSL Desktop with the DSL manual in Dillo - and with Tux with blue feet! So it doesn't work. When I kill the X server, I get dropped to the dsl text prompt, and I can see the last error messages that the kernel put out before it started X. In this case they were:
Failed to load groupfile
BScreen : : BScreen: managing screen 0 using visual 0x21, depth 8
I also tried various settings of vga=xxxxxx and dsl vga=xxxxxxx at the boot prompt, using a list of a dozen different modes that someone had compiled for DSL. None of that worked. I think DSL simply ignored that I had already specified a video mode on the boot screen and dragged me through the whole setup sequence with the DSL X Setup boxes which essentially does the same thing, i.e. specify a video mode. I've spent countless hours now fiddling with video setup for DSL and trying to find out what's wrong; never had that much trouble before with video setup. I think there is something fundamentally flawed about those TinyX servers (i.e. xvesa and xfbdev) that DSL uses.
Maybe the DSL developers should do something to fix them to support more hardware or dump them altogether. It seems to be hard to find out anything about them - their website seems to be migrating, there seems to be no support for them, and nobody even seems to know what versions are used in DSL 0.7.2 and how old they are.
The Intel Advanced Graphics Chipset that's integrated in my motherboard works without a flaw with 5 different big Linux distros that I have installed on my machine and that use X86Free v. 11. With them I can play Tuxracer with accelerated 3D graphics in full color and at high speed. I'm not willing to disable this perfectly adequate onboard graphics support and buy a separate video card just to run DSL.
I thought that I could perhaps replace TinyX with X86Free and remaster the CD. I tried that by following the advice in the parallel thread "How to replace xvesa with x86free". Didn't work. Tried "apt-get install x-window-system" and "apt-get install xserver-xfree" on the command line, as both normal user and as root. Error: "no command apt-get". Supposedly apt is installed with DSL. What's wrong?
I had wanted to use DSL to impress those of my friends who are captive to MS Windows with how much can be done with Linux even on a tiny 50 MB footprint on a business card CD. I don't think they'd be impressed with blue-faced people.
Robert
|
.
DSL Market ,
Great VPS hosting provided by Tektonic
