Re: X on DELL laptop hangs
On 15 Dec, David S. Zelinsky wrote:
> A friend of mine installed hamm on a Dell laptop with Neomagic video. He got
> X configured with the VGA16 server.
I have a Dell Lattitude CPi 266XT (or whatever it's called), with a
neomagic chipset. I downloaded the XBF server from Red Hat's site which
comes with a sample XF86Config file. It works fine under Red Hat, and I
have no reason to believe it won't work fine under debian (I've
installed it under debian [it's dual boot], but have no window manager
yet so have only seen it working for a second or two - I'll let you
know what happens when I get it up if you remind in a week or so).
> He also tried dropping in the SVGA server from XFree86 3.3.3, which handles
> the Neomagic chip. The same thing happened.
doesn't sound like an X problem to me, but that's just a gut reaction.
> Ultimately, my friend installed a copy of RedHat 5.2, which worked fine, with
> none of this problem.
I don't know if 5.2 has APM support in the kernel by default. 5.1
certainly didn't.
> I feel defeated and somewhat guilty, since it was partly at my urging that
> this friend had tried Debian in the first place, so I'd really like to find
> out what went wrong.
If I was you I'd go into the bios and disable all APM related things,
and see if it still does it.
> * The problem seemed to occurs within a few seconds ( < 30? ) after
> switching to text mode (quitting X, or switching to virtual console). We
> were able to get a shell prompt, even issue a few commands, and switch
> back an forth between the v.c. and the X screen a couple of times, before
> the system would just freeze.
not so keen on the sound of that.
> * The Debian was a 2.0 CD from Cheap Bytes
so was mine, but I didn't notice anything different about it from the
normal version.
> * I didn't think of checking the BIOS settings, for things like APM. Could
> a broken APM cause symptoms like this? Then again, isn't APM disabled in
> kernel-images that ship with Debian?
If it is disabled in the kernel the BIOS will still override it if it
feels like it, sometimes leading to a hung box. I recompiled mine with
APM support and it works rather nicely (so long as you don't try and
suspend it).
--
Graham
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