Here's my sad story..... To start, I have the worst video card ever... It's based on SiS 530 chipset. It's built on to the mother board oad uses 8 megs of system memory for graphics, of course it uses the first 8 megs, so any calls to memory have to be routed around the graphics, which is slooow.
SiS is pretty cool, (even if they license their chips to hacks) They provide a version of XF86_SVGA which supports the 530, which just drops into the /usr/X11R6/bin/ directory and works fine. The problem is that it requires xfree86 3.3.5. I'm running slink which comes with 3.3.2(?), so I head off to http://www.xfree.org and grab the latest binaries and install them which goes pretty smoothly, after I find that I need to install the regframe lib. Then I drop in the SiS version of XF86_SVGA run the config and everything works great... Anyway here is the problem. A couple of days ago reading a post here I saw that xf86 3.3.5 was availible from Vincet's slink-update area so not being the smartest monkey, I decide that it would be great if my packages actually reflected my system. so I added the site to my list did an apt-get dist-upgrade. and it pulled down the files, installed and everything seemed to go ok I dropped in the SiS version of XF86_SVGA and as it was mighty late I went to sleep, however, when I restarted my system, it hung while loading the x font server (xfs). Using a rescue disk I was able to get into the system and remove the xfs entry from rc2.d . then I used apt-get to install the truetype sever (xftts). I rebooted, and it went just fine everything loaded, and wdm poped up, however, I was unable to type anything into the login box. in fact, my whole keyboard was dead with the caps-lock and numlock keys disabled (ie I could not make the LEDs turn on...) So that's where I sit... I can telnet to the machine, and all the gui functions work but I can't type. Suggestions? Thanks :) R.
