On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Barry Anderson wrote: >On install when it comes time to configure video and monitor, the test fails >on all settings (ie. 16Bit, 32Bit, all the screen sizes and resolutions), >but it probed the video card and monitor correctly. >Then later on post install bootup, X does try to do one re-configue >and falls through to text login. Using "startx" from bash just gives an >error message.
Older releases of Red Hat Linux shipped both XFree86 3.3.6 as well as 4.x. The default was 4.x unless the native 4.x driver did not work at all with a given card, or was quite broken. Some S3 cards defaulted to using one of the XFree86 3.3.6 servers in Red Hat Linux 7.x, however in 7.3 we changed the default to 4.x to see what cards broke from it. Nobody reported any problems during beta testing, so the defaults for most S3 hardware (listed as supported in the 4.2.0 documentation) stayed as 4.x. After we released 7.3, _then_ some people reported S3 hardware not working properly, so as problems were reported on a chip by chip basis, I changed the default driver to the "vesa" driver in order to start migrating away from 3.3.6. The "vesa" driver should work on all of these cards ok, although it is unaccelerated. I've not had any reports from people of "vesa" not working on S3 hardware. Also, some users tried to run Xconfigurator --preferxf3 to force using the 3.3.6 X server, however due to a bug in Xconfigurator, the proper X server doesn't get set up correctly. Again, this problem went through 3 public beta releases without anyone who has the hardware reporting any bugs, so it made it into the final release as well. In Red Hat Linux 8.0, in order to simplify the configuration tools infrastructure significantly, and also support overhead, we dropped 3.3.6, and defaulted all hardware to native 4.x drivers that claimed to support the given cards in XFree86 docs, and defaulted other hardware to "vesa". Any cards reported as not working during beta testing, that were not able to work with simple workarounds (noaccel/swcursor/XaaNoxxxx), were defaulted to the "vesa" driver, or if vesa did not work, then "vga" was the default. Of course there were still cards that users did not report not-working during beta testing, and so there are various S3 cards that don't work out of the box in 8.0 using the config tool defaults. Users can choose an alternate driver easily however, and the "vesa" driver is strongly recommended if the given native driver doesn't work. For XFree86 4.3.0, I've narrowed the list of supported cards down much more accurately due to user feedback, however more feedback is always appreciated. If anyone can't get a card to work with the driver we default to, they should file a bug report in Red Hat bugzilla and include their config file, and XFree86 log file as text file attachments so we can try to find a fix or workaround. I'll do my best to resolve the issue in hopes that future erratum works off the get go, and future Red Hat Linux releases work out of the box. -- Mike A. Harris _______________________________________________ XFree86 mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
