Setting up X on Netvista
I have been working through various set-up issues relating to XFree86.
I have made some progress with the video resolution that I thought I
should share:
Running latest Debian Sarge (3.1) with kernel 2.4.27-2-386 on an IBM
8306KCU Netvista (512 Mbyte Ram). The motherboard has an Intel 82845G
(Brookdale) on-board video and sound controller.
The i810 driver seems most applicable, and was used
I can now support modes 1024x768, 800x600 at colour depth 24.
The problem was that initially X would only run at a resolution of
640x480, reminiscent of Windows 3.1 with a 1 Mbyte video card, so i
checked the log file:
var/log/XFree86.0.log
There were no (EE) error messages but a careful scan of the log showed
that the "Bios now sees 832 KB VideoRam". This seemed too small for
resolutions higher than 640x480.
A additional message was that "Max space available for video modes: 832 KByte".
This seemed to confirm that insufficient video ram was being assigned.
I had set aside 64mbyte of video in the X set-up during configuration.
I finally checked my BIOS settings on the PC (F1 on boot for the
Netvista) and under "video set-up" set the following:
Shared system memory 8192K (this is the maximum allowed)
Active video Integrated
Graphics Aperture 64mb.
The BIOS changes were the final link in setting higher resolutions in
X, and I have close to 8mbyte now available for video modes.
An interesting side-note; the PC dual boots WinXP Home and worked
perfectly well at high resolutions using the original BIOS
settings???? Don't know how or why.
Dave W.
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