Hazzmat,Yep.
I've used lots of S3 cards with LTSP.
You said you installed the ltsp_x336_s3 package. Did you also set XSERVER = XF86_S3 ? I'm guessing you did, but just figured I'd make sure.
Ok I guess I was remembering a similar IBM desktop with onboard S3trio, but with 2MB video RAM instead of 1MB. I've accumulated a small pile of old desktops more or less the same.Adding swap via NFS won't help the video at all. it's only gonna help system ram.
with only 1mb of video ram, you can't do 1024x768 16-bits. that requires 1.5mb of video ram. ( 1024 x 768 ) * 2 = 1,572,864
So, the fact that you only get 800x600 doesn't surprise me.
That would mathematically explain the 800x600 desktop. Could it also be the source of the flickering/tearing? Another "artifact" that I didn't describe in the original post was a vertical band of noise-like distortion up the right side of the screen. Heck maybe the S3 chip in this PC is just about to kick the can.
I don't have any PCI video cards to test with yet, but I can see that I'll be definitely needing them now.
S3 Savage IX --anyone have experience with these and X (the X4 version that comes with LTSP)? Or does anyone know of another kind of PCI video card that is truly well supported but cheap as dirt? like $15< ?
Thanks.
Jim McQuillan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Sat, 15 Nov 2003, hazzmat wrote:
Hello, I have just made my first experimental install of LTSP. The server is Mandrake 9.0 and I used rpms from sourceforge as they seemed to install OK. The etherboot nic is a tulip lne100 from diskless workstations with onboard bootrom. Between the ws001 (which is an old p166 desktop w/32 MB of RAM) is a 100base-t switch. The server also has a 100base-t nic.
With a little scraped knuckles everything is basically working. Praise be to LTSP.
However, there is this weird flickering of the root window. Like part of the GDM window appears to be tearing off from the login box and appears slightly displaced to the right. It flickers like this appearing and disappearing in less than half a second.
This is an 1996 vintage desktop from IBM with S3trio builtin video chipset and 1 MB ram. I know desktops like this will do 1024x768 at 16 bits, but this setup is producing only a 800x600 desktop and this flickering problem. I altered lts.conf for ws001 so that it used an NFS swap file to increase the locally available RAM but it didn't help.
Could the flickering be network related?
Or is it simply not good enough a video chipset for use with LTSP ? I installed the Xfree86-3.3.6 server for S3 instead of going with X4. I tried X4 at first --it didn't seem terribly happy. I don't think these S3trio chipsets were well supported by X4 until X4.3. I 've also never known this flickering or desktop size limitation to happen with a system built on this desktop with a normal (local) install. I don't recall ever seeing such bad artifacts with remote X display either.
Is this unusual?
Do I just need to buy some halfway decent video cards to make this go away?
thanks.
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