Wookey wrote:
Hi, At home I have a potato box. It's an x86 PC, P233MMX, 96Mb RAM, all pretty conventional except that the primary HD and floppy channels are dead (free motherboard :-) so they are served via an isa multi IO card. I can't get X to work reliably. The video card is a 'Diamond stealth 64' - ie an S3 Trio64 chip. 1Mb RAM. If I use the S3 server then the machine just hangs after 10-20 minutes, apparently during an HD access because the HD light is stuck on and there is often filesystem corruption when I reboot. It never crashes when the same machine is left (with X still running) but in a text mode. It can run for days like this. I have no idea how to trace this bug - any suggestions. I assume this is a hardware interaction problem. Are there speed options I can turn down somewhere. Are there S3 server options I can turn on/off to see if it helps?
Since you may be having hardware problems, try looking at some of logs to see if you can determine what problems are occurring:
~/.xsession-errors ~/.gnome-errors /var/log/XFree86.0.log /var/log/dmesg /var/log/kern.log /var/log/messages /var/log/syslog
Recently I changed to using the VGA server on this card for a bit. Horrible display but no crashes for some hours - seems stable. Next I installed the SVGA server and that also doesn't seem to cause crashes when left sitting there but I can't really use it as something is badly wrong with the display of fonts. Many font are just random blockiness where the writing should be.
Boxes instead of letters may be related to bug in gtk. There has been a lot of messages on this list on problems like this in the last few months. If you are use a font server like xfs, try reinstalling it. You can search for other possible solutions at http://lists.debian.org/search.html.
gdm (ie gnome) menu text is OK but the 'welcome' and user/password text is unreadble. Xterms are illegible as are eterms and gnome terminal. emacs body text is OK but the menus are illegible. Gnome Help browser links are illegible. Gnome filer text is OK as are all the menus. I don't know how all these fonts are generated but I assume the broken ones are all generated or rendered in the same way. Anyone seen this before? I'd like to either make the S3 server work reliably or the SVGA server display fonts. TIA please cc me responses. Wookey
-- Jerome