User Feedback :: Colour and Display Problems

Hello Gang!

I received, a while back, a CD of DSL v. 0.7 from a friend. My computer is a Dell Dimension XPS P90 with a 90 MHz Pentium processor and 128 MB of RAM. The video card is an Imagine i128. I have a 14k hardware modem and a 56k Motorola Voicsurfr modem. The CD drive is not bootable and so I use a boot floppy.

I have tried, many times, to have DSL run properly on my computer. It does boot, however, the display is poor. If I choose a resolution of 1024x*x*, a grey stipple pattern appears on the background. Changing style adds colours, but often text is unreadable. No icons appear on the desktop, nor even the disk with the penguin in the centre. I am able to get some applications to run, such as Ted and XTetris.

When I boot setting the lowest resolution, the display is coloured, Dillo with an introduction to DSL appears, the central penguin disk is displayed, but there is a colour problem (the splotchy type that appears when two programmes running colours conflict with each other). XTetris does not run.

Changing colour depth seems to make no difference.

I removed the Voicesurfr modem, just in case a conflict with the sound card were, somehow, the problem. The result was the same.

These are the error messages that appear when shutting down after booting with the 1024x*x* resolution:

**********
insmod:\lib\modules\2.4.22.xfs\kernel\arch\i386\kernel\apm.o: init-module: No such device

insmod:\lib\modules\2.4.22.xfs\kernel\arch\i386\kernel\apm.o: char-major-10-134 failed Failed to load groupfile

BScreen::BScreen:manager screen0 using visual 0x21, depth 4

ImageControl::BImageControl: invalid colormapsize 125(5\5\5) - reducing

Gdk-WARNING**: visual typ=static color depth=4, image bpp=4, lsbfirst is not supported by GdkRGB
*********

With the lowest resolution, there is a series of error messages about failed colour display, upon shut down, that I will not reproduce.

On my friend's machine (which happens to be a higher Pentium with more RAM) boot up with the floppy works fine and DSL seems to run with no problems.

In its current state, I cannot use DSL. Could it be my video card? By any chance, has the newest version solved this problem? On the other hand, is the problem with Knoppix or even Debian, meaning that all distributions based on these, such as Feather Linux, will not work on my machine?

Thank you for any help.

Have you tried both Xvesa and fbdev, if not, try the other one. You could also add -swaprgb in .xserverrc in your home directory; you first have to kill X with crtl+alt+backspace, edit the file and finally run startx.

Some info about the Xvesa server:
http://www.xfree86.org/current/Xvesa.1.html
http://www.xfree86.org/current/Xkdrive.1.html

try using 800x600

As recommended, I have tried xfbdev instead of xvesa. This does not work at all. It gives, as error:

modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module fb0
XIO: fatal IO error 104 (connection reset by peer) on X server "0.0" after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining .

I also tried xvesa with -swaprgb. This produced the same colour problems as before. I will soon try the 800x600 mode and other commands in xvesa.

Thanks for the effort.

I have tried 800x600 resolution and I get the same result as the lowest resolution.

Since, during boot up, I always get the message "You passed an undefined mode number", and trying different modes does not seem to help, I added the -listmodes argument to the xvesa command. This always causes an error and the GUI does not initiate, leaving me with the command prompt.

Adding and deleting various arguments to the xvesa command does not help.

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