Install on an old Laptop - XVesa issues

[marcelocp]

Hi,

I'm trying to install TC in an old HP Ominibook 800. It's a 166MHz pentium MMX with 80 Mb RAM.

TC boots fine (despite no ACPI), but when Xvesa comes up, screen is garbled. Xvesa -listmodes shows all usual modes up to 1024x768x32, but the lcd can do only 800x600x8.

Booting with text option, I modified .xsession, replacing 1024x768x32 by 800x600x8. When I startx, the screen gets vertical pink strips and I can barely see the desktop. I see that mouse works (I can click on the desktop and get the menus, etc.).

The free command returns that used memory is about 27 MB, and everything else seems to be working fine. But the vertical stripes make it hard to read anything on the screen.

I have tried all the command-line options XVesa -help shows me are available. I have also searched this forum for possible workarounds/fixes, but didn't find any.

My questions:
a) Is there any known solution for the stripes problem?
b) If the only solution is to use Xfbdev, is there a way I can install it to hda1 before booting TC (i.e., using another O.S.) and have TC load it at boot time? I mean, since I can't read TC's desktop (due to the stripes), I can't install Xfbdev from within TC...

Besides that issue (which I believe are due to buggy hardware/bios, not due to TC), I'm impressed with the responsiveness I'm getting from this old old lappy with TC- It looks like I'm about to get a working netbook from my pile of old hardware!

Thanks in advance,

mcp

[tobiaus]

b) If the only solution is to use Xfbdev, is there a way I can install it to hda1 before booting TC (i.e., using another O.S.) and have TC load it at boot time? I mean, since I can't read TC's desktop (due to the stripes), I can't install Xfbdev from within TC...

you can try booting tinycore text 786, or just tinycore text, to see if that helps. then you can sudo /usr/bin/tce-fetch nameoftce.tce any files you need for xfbdev

tce-load nameoftce.tce those files to load them.

note that sudo is used before tce-fetch.sh, but not before tce-load. see also http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=1391.0

[roberts]

It is quite easy to get Xfbdev from the text mode of TC and then boot into Framebuffer.
See: http://tinycorelinux.com/faq.html#framebuffer

[marcelocp]

Thanks roberts and tobiaus. It seems that I missed that point in the faq. I'll try that today and will let you know the outcome - I hope Xfbdev doesn't show the Xvesa "stripes" issue. I'm curious about how slow this old hardware will be when running Opera with stuff like Ajax and flash.