SliTaz Forum

Thriftee

Member

Registered: 2014-09-22

Posts: 31

Screen color resolution coming up too low

I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 Laptop with a built in nVidia Geforce 2 Go 1600x1200 screen. 

According to vbeinfo under grub2 it has a VESA BIOS Extension video Driver, version 3.0 with 32768 KiB memory.  I would like it to display in 1600 x 1200 x 16, but i think its using 1600 x 1200 x 8.  Revlevant available modes shown under vbeinfo are:

0x145 1600 x 1200 x 8 palletted

0x146 1600 x 1200 x 16 direct color mask 5/6/5/0 pos 11/5/0/0

When I go look at the Xorg.0.log It says:

(==) Matched nouveau as autoconfigured driver 0

(==) Matched nv as autoconfigured driver 1

(==) Matched vesa as autoconfigured driver 2

(==) Matched fbdev as autoconfigured driver 3

It couldn't find nouveau or nv, and it loads vesa and fbdev

it gets an error on vesa saying

vesa: ignoring device with a bound kernel driver

(WW) falling back to old probe method for vesa

(II) Loading sub module "fbdevhw"

and later

(II) FBDEV(1): using default device

(II) FBDEV(1): creating default display subsection in screen section "Default Screen Section" for depth/fbbpp 8/8

(==) FBDEV(1): Depth 8, (==) framebuffer bpp 8

(==) FBDEV(1): Default visual is PseudoColor

(==) FBDEV(1): Using gamma correction (1.0, 1.0, 1.0)

(II) FBDEV(1): hardware: nouveaufb (video memory: 2100kB)

(II) FBDEV(1): checking modes against framebuffer device...

(II) FBDEV(1): checking modes against monitor...

(--) FBDEV(1): Virtual size is 1600x1200 (pitch 1600)

(++) FBDEV(1):  Built-in mode "current"

(==) FBDEV(1): DPI set to (96, 96)

later it says

(II) UnloadModule: "vesa"

There is also an error on GLX

(EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so failed   no such file

(EE) GLX: Could not load software renderer

(II) GLX : No usable GL providers found for screen 0

Since its a low memory (512mb) machine, I am trying to avoid loading any big drivers that are unnecessary, but will load what I need to for the screen to work properly.

How can I get it to display 16 colors?  When I display things the colors are very grainy...

If more info is needed please just reference or link to whatever command you need the output from and if it can't be posted here, please  specify how you'd like it posted.

Thanks for any ideas or suggestions...

az_ua

Moderator

Registered: 2014-05-02

Posts: 284

Re: Screen color resolution coming up too low

8-bit(256) ugly colors is known bug of nvidia hardware.

> It couldn't find nouveau or nv, and it loads vesa and fbdev

Why are you not using search before.

[c]tazpkg -s nouveau[/c]

or http://root:root@tazpanel:82/pkgs.cgi?search=nvidia&repo=Any

Without installing additional drivers use kernel option: video=1600x1200-16

Also take a look here(links with default password :root@):

http://root:root@tazpanel:82/hardware.cgi?detect

Can you see any "Missing module" here?

I found we have deprecated module naming somewhere.

Thriftee

Member

Registered: 2014-09-22

Posts: 31

Re: Screen color resolution coming up too low

A belated thanks for the reply.  I ended up using the kernel boot option video-1600x1200-16 and that works fine, but the machine was down for a couple weeks, so I never got back here. 

LOL, If you have never seen slitaz before, you don't know that the login screen isn't supposed to be red and the screen background isn't supposed to be a blue/green/yellow kaleidoscope of colors in the form of a web for a spider, and its not till you try to look at a pic that you know what its SUPPOSED to look like that you realized the display is all wrong.

BTW, for now at least, I now have the functionality working to add other packages, but I'll probably avoid adding the video drivers that might reduce available memory because that machine is pretty strapped with only 512mb.  I am very impressed with slitaz lightweight memory footprint compared to any other fully featured distro.  Its running in about 1/3 the memory that Manjaro takes, or 1/2 of what antiX needs, and that's pretty darned good, IMO.

Thanks again...