From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: The (new) Trident XP4m32 video card in the Toshiba Tecra M1 isn't recognised in installation and is installed as a generic VESA with 16-bit colour. The colours don't display properly in this mode so the graphic install is virtually unreadable and a text install has to be done. After installation, it turns out that VESA does work in 8-bit pseudocolour mode but not in the default 16-bit or in 24-bit mode. So what's the problem with that? Well, no truecolour, no acceleration so a high-end laptop's capabilities rather wasted. Then tried playing with the options for the trident driver (explicitly identifying it as a cyberbladeXPAi1 chipset -- which it isn't really, but that's the nearest that the driver supports -- and giving its PCI address, in XF86Config). So far, only using the ShadowFB (i.e. unaccelerated again) option can I get it to display at all without locking up; it will now display 16- and 24-bit colour 'properly', but no matter what I've tried to date (various resolutions etc.) the desktop is 4 times the size of the screen -- i.e., I only see the top left hand quarter. This is frustrating. Do I have to wait for a new XFree86 trident driver release before my M1 will be fully functional in Linux? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): XFree86-4.3.0-2 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Run graphical install 2. Try to read the mud 3. Give up and run text install 4. Set 8-bit for VESA; OK, can now see 4. Play around with XF86Config trident driver options Actual Results: So far, either (i) X crashes/hangs or (ii) if using ShadowFB option, can only see 1/4 of desktop irrespective of resolution specified. Additional info:
Your video hardware is not supported by XFree86 4.3.0, and not supported by Red Hat Linux. You may experiment with the "vesa", or "vga" drivers, however neither are supported officially. The "vga" driver gives very limited graphics capability which is mostly useless on a modern desktop, while the "vesa" driver may or may not provide various different resolution choices at different color depths. The "vesa" driver uses the card's own video BIOS to set up video mode timings and is thus limited to whatever video modes the BIOS has built in. Since the "vesa" driver uses the BIOS, any modes that do not work, are bugs in the BIOS and are fixable only by the vendor via a BIOS update. They are not fixable in XFree86, and as such the vesa driver is provided unsupported, in hopes that it might work if no other driver is available. Another option, is to try the kernel framebuffer driver, although it is not supported by us either, although we provide it as-is for an extra option for those who wish to try it out anyway. The Framebuffer-HOWTO can be used to set this up if desired. We will not be able to support this video hardware until XFree86 upstream has added support for it in a stable new XFree86 release. You may wish to contact XFree86.org and/or Trident to inquire about when they expect this hardware to be supported if you wish. This isn't a bug, but rather just unsupported hardware, so closing as NOTABUG