Re: Frustration with XFree86 and Via K8M800
> Hi all, I'm experiencing major difficulties getting my new
> AMD64 PC to load X successfully.
>
> The PC is an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ on a Gigabyte
> GA-K8VM800M, 2 x 512MB Kingmax PC3200, 80GB Seagate SATA.
>
> I'm attempting to run XFree86 with the Vesa driver, as
> there is no Via driver, and I have run other Via cards
> with the Vesa driver successfully in i386 Sarge.
>
> Has anyone got any idea what's going on with this? I'm
> getting desperate and will soon have to resort to running
> i386 Sarge as I've just spent almost $1000 on this PC only
> for it not to work...
>
Hi,
Are you still looking into this? Anyway the vesa framebuffer driver works ok
(e.g. boot with 'vga=0x31b'), and then you can use the fbdev driver for X.
That works great though I'll still like to get the Via specific drivers
working if possible. For one thing the generic driver doesn't set the refresh
rate so it's 60Hz, not good on a CRT.
So here's what I found out about the various drivers that are out there. Has
anyone got any suggestions about these?
1. The framebuffer driver on the Via website:
---------------------------------------------
http://downloads.viaarena.com/drivers/video/LinuxUniChrome/Linux_FBDev20040311.zip
However, it's for 2.4.x kernels (the interface for framebuffer drivers changed
between 2.4.x and 2.6.x). So I installed kernel-source-2.4.27, and compiled
it like so:
# make-kpkg --initrd --revision=custom.1.0 kernel_image
However when I try to install it:
# dpkg -i ../kernel-image-2.4.27_custom.1.0_amd64.deb
I get the following:
Setting up kernel-image-2.4.27 (custom.1.0) ...
/bin/bash: error while loading shared libraries: libdl.so.2: cannot open
sharedobject file: No such file or directory
Failed to create initrd image.
dpkg: error processing kernel-image-2.4.27 (--install):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 9
Errors were encountered while processing:
kernel-image-2.4.27
Any ideas on what I may be doing wrong there?
I also tried a non-initrd kernel. That compiles ok, but then when it boots it
gets to:
Partition check:
hda:
then just hangs.
2. Via X drivers
----------------
The only X drivers I could find on the Via website were 32-bit binaries for
various other distros.
Both XFree86 4.4 and XOrg 6.8.1 have a Via driver. I think they got the driver
from from the unichrome project (unichrome.sf.net), which was based initially
on drivers from Via themselves.
So I downloaded XOrg 6.8.1 and gave it a try, though I'm afraid it doesn't
work very well with the k8m800. I had a look also at the current CVS head,
though that seems to work a bit less well again.
So maybe for the time being my best bet would be to compile a 2.4.x kernel.
Anyway, if anyone's got any suggestions...
Thanks
Ned.
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