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
