[H-GEN] getting x working on laptop with a sis chipset video...

[Tony Nugent]

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I'm not a novice with configuring video cards, and I've googled and
tried all sorts of things, but I'm struggling with this and the bald
patch on the top is rapidly growing...


ASUS laptop (L3000D/athlon2400m+), SiS740 chipset (yeah I know:)
with 32Mb shared ram, XFree 4.3.0 (suse8.2).

It just doesn't work.  As soon as the X server starts up, all I see
are a bunch of thin coloured vertical lines on a (generally) white
background.  (Suse's X configurator simply locks the screen up
completely when it starts).

I've tried all sorts of settings (incl special LCD tweaks for the
sis X driver), different resolutions/hsync/vrefresh settings, etc).
No joy, this happens every time, making tweaks results in nothing
but a change in the pattern of the coloured vertical bands.

Worse... when I go back to a text console (whether framebuffer mode
or not), the screen goes blank momentarily, then returns to the
banding pattern again.  (At this point I do have kbd console
control, just no screen to look at...  eg, at least I can blindly
c-a-d or otherwise type commands - such as "reboot" :)

If anyone can help me to get this laptop running an X server at
something like 1026x768, I'd be very grateful.

Also, is there any way to restore a sane vga text mode if the X
server has scrambled it?  SVGATextMode totally locks the screen and
kbd, unfortunately making it quite useless.  So is fbset when using
framebuffer modes - it does nothing in vesa mode, and the sisfb
module doesn't seem to work at all.

Thanks for any pointers.

Cheers
Tony

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