Re: old hardware, newer Debian

[Roman Stöckl-Schmidt <roman@stoeckl-schmidt.de>]

Ron Johnson schrieb:
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> On 02/03/07 00:50, Mike McClain wrote:
> > > s. keeling <keeling@spots.ab.ca> said:
> > > Mike McClain <mike.mcclain@nowhere.net>:
> > > >  I just installed sarge on a box I've happily been running woody on
> > > >  for 5 years and find I can't run X cause the Trident tvga 9800b
> > > >  chipset is no longer supported in the xserver-xfree86 v4.3. Any
> > > Try the svga driver.  I'm using a PCI Matrox card, development of
> > > which was stopped long ago.  svga driver picked up the slack and it
> > > works beautifully.
> >     Pardon the typo, the board is a Trident tvga 8900b, sometimes my 
> > fingers seem lisdexic.
> >
> >     I've tried 'dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86' with many different
> > combinations.
> >     I've tried xf86config, xf86config and xdebconfigurator.
> > I've started over and done a full re-install on another partition,
> > thinking my minimul install might have missed something critical.
> >
> >     Not once have I seen a chance to select svga. 
> > Vga and vesa yes but not svga. 
> >
> >     Can you tell me what package gives you that functionality?
> > My board predates vesa hence doesn't answer properly and I get a black
> > screen, that's the case with the latest install now and it's booting 
>
> Whoa, that's an *old* card.
>
> If it's a PCI card, then you should be able to buy a cheap newer one
> off eBay.

I can only concur with that. But to add:

I had a a s3 trio64v+ once and had the same problem when upgrading from 
woody to sarge. In woody there were both v3.3.6 and 4.1.0 versions of 
XFree86 servers available. So basically if you want to use this card in 
etch or sarge you need to get Xfree86 3.3.6 in.

I'm writing this merely out of curiosity because I really don't consider 
the following to be a good idea, but I'd love to know wether it works 
anyway.

You could just add entries to oldstable (i.e. woody) to your 
sources.list and try to

# aptitude -t oldstable install xserver-svga

or try to

# apt-get source xfree86v3

with the appropriate line in your sources.list

BUT since you've upgraded to sarge you probably don't want a five (or 
more) year old xserver that is crippled when it comes to functionality 
compared to xorg or whatever.

So bottom line is, best bet if you want to keep using the card IF the 
xserver-xorg-trident packages drive your card would be to upgrade top 
etch or optionally use a backported version in sarge.

Cheers, Roman.