Re: strange melting screen when X starts
On Fri, 28 Jul 2000, name wrote:
>
> I've done it. I found an option in my BIOS setup called 'resolution
> expended', and it was enabled by default. I disabled it and the melting
> screen never show again. But there is a trade off. I can only get 640x480
> small screen for text mode now. It's a bit painful. Can I have both full
> screen text mode and a nice X?
>
If I was you I would remove the references for your 640x480 screen mode
for X as it's pointless so that X automatically defaults to 800x600. If
you still need 640x480 make it the second mode definition so that X
default to 800x600. Then re-enable your screen expansion and reboot. See
what that does. With screen expansion I hope you have found a nice text
console screen size to use so that when the text is expanded it looks
okay. This involves a kernel recompile and various things. If you need
to know how to do this just ask and I will guide you through this.
> 1) X can't be killed nicely. After ctrl-alt-backspace or 'exit' 'restart'
> from menu, it will get back to the login screen, and the system hangs up.
> But I can swich to text mode by ctrl-alt-Fx, and can also nicely back to X
> by alt-F7. And it also hangs up at the xdm login screen after comes back
> from suspend mode.
>
This is probably do to some of the X server acceleration functions being
activated that then play havac with your machine due to X not knowing
about suspend and hibernate.
Add to you XF86Config file under the graphics card section
---
Option "noaccel"
---
and see what that does. There are quite a few acceleration options
avaliable for the trident cards (see trident.txt or something
similar) that you can play with to try and get more speed or
compatibility from X. However usually these can be direct trade-offs and
only a trial and error approach method can find whats good and whats not.
> 3) The floppy LED keeps on from power on to power off, no matter in Linux
> or Win98. It had never happened before I configed my new XFree86. I saw an
> article about this problem before. But I can't find it again.
>
I was only able to get sometihng like this on a desktop machine by
plugging the floppy drive in the wrong way round ;)
> 4) I still can't login as a normal user. I guess it's because something
> wrong with my upgrade from 3.3.2 to 4.0.1. For example...
>
When I upgraded to X 4.0.0 some time ago I did a straight binary write
over. This caused me no problems. However instead of xdm I use Login.app
as it provides a much nicer login screen :)
Just type
---
apt-get install Login.app
---
and see if that helps if you have apt-get setup. If you don't just find
the relevent Login.app deb packages and manually install them.
If this doesn't work a possibility is that xdm (or Login.app) is not being
run as root and so you may be able to change this by editing
/etc/inittab. However I'm not sure.
> And some X scripts still look for 'xbanner' 'freetemp' programs which
> can't be found in 4.0.1.
>
these if I remember can be found in some other tarball from
www.xfree86.org or its relevent mirror sites.
> The /etc/xinit/xserverrc is a link to itself, and seems never work. Does
> it matter?
>
??? The only useful configuration files for X windows for me has been
XF86Config and .xsession. I never actually was able to get xserverrc to
do anything constructive, however this could just be me :)
> The /etc/init.d/xdm script runs /usr/sbin/parse-xf86config program which
> can not cope with 4.0.1 XF86Config file.
>
try Login.app much nicer ;)
good luck
Alex
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