Re: X on Acorn RiscPC
On Thu, Mar 30, 2000 at 09:52:46AM -0600, Jim Studt wrote:
> > It seems that people are succesfully getting Debian to work on Acorn RiscPC
> > machines by a slightly hacked installation method with the current base-image.
> >
> > I am thinking of installing Debian, as I have an Acorn sitting arounf doing
> > nothing at the moment, and can't afford a Newinder.
> >
> > Does the Debian support for X include Acorn machines?? Or will I need to
> > try and get XArm from ARMLinux working??
>
> The only X server in the current distribution is the FBDev which should
> work as long as the linux frame buffer code works. It would be nice
> to get an accelerated svga server going. If you can tell me what
> sort of video hardware you have I can try to get that in sooner.
RiscPC has a ARM VIDC20 chip on the motherboard talking to 0,1 or 2M of dual
ported video RAM. (Not sure if Linux can cope with 0M and use the main memory)
There's no hardware acceleration; the cpu blats straight to the video memory.
Hardware can do 24,16/15 (flexible in how many bits to assign to each gun IIRC)
8,4,2 and 1 bpp. 24bpp stores each pixel in a 32 bit word; the maximum VRAM
clock speed is 160Mhz (but that's really overclocking the chip; mine gets upset
in a hot office at the maximum resolutions this offers); with the official
machine spec being something like 152Mhz for the VIDC chip.
(ie 1280x1024 in 8 bit colour at 80Hz, 1600x1200 in 8 bit colour, 1152x900 in
16 bit, 800x600 24bit are something like the maximum possible resolutions when
you're hammering it)
The older A series machines have older VIDC chips and no dedicated video RAM.
There's a maximum of 480K of the main memory available for screen display.
(specific chips at the bottom of physical memory)
(I'm sure that's not quite perfect but I think it's got the important bit;
there's no hardware acceleration)
> There has been a surge in Acorn folk all of a sudden. I'm building
Redhat sucks. (I'll stand by that. /sbin should not contain dynamically linked
binaries) So I guess other people are like me and want to switch to a decent
distribution.
> what may be a usable Acorn install image now. I'll start sending
> instructions and pointers to it when its done building (1 hour?).
Thank you for your time and effort,
Nicholas Clark
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