X server choices

[coolcargo]

I'm running tc on a very old Toshiba Sattelite 4030CDT laptop.

The standard boot didn't work. I get a blinking cursor when Xvesa is supposed to start. ctrl-C brings me to the prompt. Still, in top, Xvesa is there, eating 100% cpu, that is without a working X environment, just console.

I guess this means Xvesa isn't supported on this machine. But I wonder why. I remember using the vesa xorg driver on this machine a while back, with archlinux I think. Or has this nothing to do with xvesa? Also even longer ago I remember having used kdrive (I believe it was called like that) with one of these redhat ultra ultra light script distros. Is it possible/useful to investigate further that xvesa is going to work or not on my system. Is it feasible to recompile it with other settings ? Or does it just plain not work.

 
Anyway I killed the Xvesa proc and when I started it again with the -videoTest option I got a nasty, very hard, total system crash.

As proposed by the faq, I tried the framebuffer route. And it's running OK, but the scrolling speed on opera is a Royal p.....

I wonder why you state that using full blown xorg is a last resort.
Is it because of design constraints of tc, avoiding bloat ?
Or is it because it would crawl even slower than xfbdev ?


Cheers
Bart

[curaga]

It's because of design, adding Xorg would more than quadruple the size of TC

The vesa driver of Xorg is more compatible than Xvesa, so it might run where Xvesa does not.
Kdrive means the whole set of tinyX servers, I wonder if you used a card-specific one instead of Xvesa back then?

[Jason W]

coolcargo,
Do me one favor if you would.  Start TC in text mode and then edit your .xserverrc to display at 800x600 and see if that helps.  Perhaps the default display is too high for your system.  Also, you may want to see if the Xvesa extension in the extension area helps, though it is i686 only and I don't know if your machine is a i586.

The Xvesa included in TC comes from a standard i486 compatible build of Xfree-4.8.0 with the mouse issue patched.