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Maximize Xorg compatibility?

(13 posts) (4 voices)

• Started 12 years ago by mqudsi
• Latest reply from mqudsi
• This topic is not a support question

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1. 

   mqudsi
   

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   If I have an SliTaz Live CD (4.0), and I want to customize it for maximum compatibility at the cost of performance/optimization/whatever, what can I do?

   i.e. my number 1 main priority over ANYTHING else is to get X11 to load. I don't care what drivers it's using, how poor the performance is, or anything else - that's all secondary.

   I know that unfortunately XVesa support has been dropped. I cannot use SliTaz 3 because the toolchain is inadequate for our purposes. Xfbdev has proved (in the mailing lists) to be a very poor and buggy replacement.

   That said, what can I do to customize the X11 configuration to make it load on any PC anywhere (assume RAM is not an issue)?

   Also, we are interested in donating to the SliTaz project. Is there any particular needs (funds for certain project, hardware, etc) we can help with?

   Posted 12 years ago #
2. 

   devl547
   

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   ~ # cook my_life

   >what can I do to customize the X11 configuration to make it load on any PC anywhere

   keyboard, mouse, synaptics and evdev input drivers + VESA as video driver

   Posted 12 years ago #
3. 

   mqudsi
   

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   Thanks for your reply. Doesn't it already default to VESA if it can't load anything else?

   EDIT

   Actually, Xorg.conf is showing Driver "Vesa" so that's not the solution :( I've had something like 70% of beta testers tell me it simply doesn't load on their PC. Some ATi, some Nvidia.

   I created a "fork" of SliTaz 4 w/ Xvesa and it works, but the screen resolution *must* be manually set or else I get really weird results (it appears the frequency is wrong, all sorts of colors dancing across the screen before it fails), plus it never uses the max monitor resolution. But if manually set, widescreen and everything work.

   Posted 12 years ago #
4. 

   Trixar_za
   

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   Here's the thing: Xorg will default to Vesa if it doesn't find a compatible driver, even IF a compatible driver is avaliable. That's what it does for my SiS chipset. Removing vesa forced it to select sis, which worked. I also removed all the other drivers, so maybe that helped too, but I'm not sure. I think it takes the closest match with the absense of vesa.

   Posted 12 years ago #
5. 

   mqudsi
   

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   Is Vesa guaranteed to work with anything similar to Xvesa?

   I've done some experimentation and saw that if there's any "preferred" driver on the system, it will switch to the preferred driver (if iso is created with tazlito). I'm wondering if perhaps the presence of another driver which Xorg *thought* would work but didn't is what's happening, and so it did not fall back to Vesa.

   Basically: should I uninstall all other drivers and force it to use vesa? Or is installing vesa and all other drivers, then letting Xorg choose which it likes the better option? Remember, this is for maximum compatibility with *any* machine, not just mine.

   Posted 12 years ago #
6. 

   Trixar_za
   

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   Xorg will probably use vesa if nothing better can be found. Panko told me it detected correctly for his intel chipset, so I assume vesa is the fall back if it can't detect the proper driver to use. My chipset probably didn't report properly, so xorg just went with vesa. When I removed everything but sis, xorg was forced to use it instead. This is a really weird 'bug' - if we can even call it that.

   Posted 12 years ago #
7. 

   mqudsi
   

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   No, that's not the behavior I'm seeing. One of my testers had an Intel chipset and the live CD I gave him had both Intel and Vesa. That didn't work (straight to command prompt), but a CD with only Vesa did work to some extent (X starts, but it's a blank, black screen). Xvesa works for everyone, but no automatic resolution.

   Posted 12 years ago #
8. 

   mqudsi
   

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   I guess what's happening in my case is that Xorg is finding something "better" that doesn't work. Sure, xorg-xf86-video-intel is a better match than vesa for the laptop's embedded graphics, but it's not robust enough. So Xorg is going down that route, which ultimately fails.

   Does that sound sane?

   Posted 12 years ago #
9. 

   Trixar_za
   

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   Probably - it could also be accidentally selecting the nv (nvidia) driver, which is also one of the three included drivers.

   The trouble with the new Xorg is that the SliTaz devs don't fully understand the current version yet. Xorg has this annoying habit of breaking previous conventions, which means everybody has to play catch up with it :|

   Posted 12 years ago #
10. 

    mqudsi
    

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    Do you know of any automatic resolution detection tools for Xvesa?

    Posted 12 years ago #
11. 

    Somewhat Reticent
    

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    (Automated intelligence rarely exceeds the effectiveness of simple human wisdom. ;-)
    Would that require a huge hardware database in the base system?
    Would that make it less modular, and more monolithic, like PCLOS?
    Should the boot process ask choice of graphics base, and video driver package, like it verifies language and keyboard?
    Like Wayland vs Xorg vs Xvesa vs Xfree86? And then nv vs amd vs ati ... ?
    When booting presents a blank screen, there should be a keystroke to exit to a fallback display mode. Or (sigh) reboot.
    (Newbie here, just askin' ;-)

    Posted 12 years ago #
12. 

    mqudsi
    

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    It's a solved problem. Xorg does a fine job detecting the correct resolution. Xvesa by contrast always uses this a tiny 800x600 that has the wrong frequency (bands of colors tightly knit across the screen), flickers, then dies (and this is on ALL the machines I've tried). But if you configure the right widthxheightxdepth, it works like a dream.

    Xrandr can detect resolutions fairly well, though it also contains some invalid ones. And if you'll go through the thread, I'm trying to make it a ZERO user-prompt experience. That's why I'm so frustrated with both Xorg and Xvesa.

    Actually, I have one other question - is it possible to disable screen scaling with Xvesa? I might not care if it's an incorrect resolution so long as it doesn't stretch. You know, black margins on the top/side with the actual X screen centered rather than stretched to fit?

    Posted 12 years ago #
13. 

    mqudsi
    

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    Sorry to keep double-posting, but I'm writing as I experiment and the edit option expires past an hour.

    Xfbdev also works perfectly, but must the resolution be hard-coded in the vga=xxx boot parameter? Can I mix Xorg's resolution detection with the option Driver "fbdev" and override the framebuffer set at boot time? (I'm guessing no, as I assume the framebuffer must be created in real mode, though I could be (and hope to be) wrong on this)

    Posted 12 years ago #

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