On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Christian Convey wrote:
IIRC, however, the main reason you had me pull a new version of XF86 from CVS was to see if it fixed the problem where on my virtual consoles, the last half of the last line is below the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, I do still have that problem.
One detail I forgot to mention: Always (regardless of any playing around I've done), I have another problem: Mandrake 9.1 gives me what I think is a boot-loader menu during startup. The text inside that menu is absolutely garbled, but the rest of the graphics on that screen look normal. \
When I hit Enter and go to the screen that shows the startup log messages scrolling by, the text there, and from then on, looks perfectly normal. Could this be related to my virtual console problem?
It could be. I noticed that there didn't appear to be a 1440x900 mode supported by the bios. It's possible that the kernel framebuffer stuff relies on that. I assume you are using a kernel framebuffer? That would be rivafb either built as a kernel module or staticly compiled into the kernel. If you wanted to you could try building a kernel without kernel framebuffer support. That might help. If you get the penguin image while the kernel boot messages are flowing by, that means you've definitely got kernel framebuffer support.
Thanks. So does it work like the following?
During early boot up, the boot-loader software is responsible for rendering text, such as in my boot-loader menu. It requires bios support for those fonts, and I apparently don't have it.
Then, the kernel is responsible for rendering text. That controls the rendering of the messages that flow by as the initiation scripts run. This also relies on the BIOS support for rendering that text.
Finally, xf86 is responsible for rendering text, even on the virtual consoles. At this point a deficiency in the BIOS won't necessary matter, because xf86 can use font / resolution definitions from sources other than the BIOS to handle virtual console text rendering.
I would normally suggest trying NVIDIA's binary Linux drivers, but it is my understanding that the last NVIDIA binary Linux driver release (4363) didn't support GeForceFX laptops but the next release will, though it has not yet been released.
Thanks. Is there any way of knowing getting word when they're expected to be released?
Also, is there any remedy whatsoever for the bad text rendition shown during the boot loader? For instance, a BIOS update?
Thanks for all your help, Christian
Mark.
_______________________________________________ XFree86 mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
