Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 1720
SVGA device driver
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:49 EDT
Hello I am desparatly trying to install the CD I received from LinuxWorld, RedHat 5.2 but the video driver XFree86- SVGA-3.3.3.1-1.i386 does not work. I pulled down the same version from your website and the same messed up X windows for startx still occured. I looked at my video card and it is an S3 Virge/GX 86C386 OEM for Compaq. I had to revert to the SVGA16 driver, but it is inefficient. I have tried all the drivers for S3 and SVGA. Do you have one that will work with my video card. Paula Laudino
any inof on this bug? Paula Laudino
Unfortunately, this isn't really a bug report, but rather a support request. Without further information on the specific nature of your bug, we cannot resolve the issue. ------- Email Received From Paula.Laudino@BankAmerica.com 03/30/99 18:10 -------
As far as I am concerned this is not resloved. Let me state this again. I have an OEM S3Virger/GX 86C385 9729 54353 Video card in my PC a Compaq 4000. During the install autoprobe detected the video car to be SVGA gx which was loaded. In issueing startx after the confiuration the graphical screen becomes distorted when trying to move the window and there is a graphical box that seems to be attached to the screen mnouse pointer. The only option I have left is to replace the video card, which shouldn't be so in order for this to work it is in the list of supported devices, come'on now. Also there are other problems but we won't get into that. I need to know why this doesn't work and I am beginning to question the minimal support for RedHat as well. Also of this is not a trouble ticket bug, then what is it???????? PL ------- Additional Comments From 06/26/99 17:31 ------- Also see bug #3595 SH
*** Bug 3595 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** This is to confirm bug #1720 using RedHat 6.0 -- exactly as described for RedHat 5.2. We have over 100 Compaq DeskPro 4000's with the S3 Virge/GX video cards on site, and all that we have tried RedHat Linux 6.0 on have the same video problems, rendering the graphics interface close to useless. Any help available?Try the XFree86-3.3.3.1-52 build of X and let us know if you are still having problems. We have a ton of S3 Virge/GX cards here in the test lab and have no problems with any of them, so I am thinking that the problem may very well be with the Deskpro 4000s, which we do not have an example of in the test lab.
XFree86 decided a while back to roll over most of the S3 support into the SVGA server instead of the separate S3 server as before. Therefore the Red Hat installer and Xconfigurator normally by default install the SVGA server for most S3 cards that it probes. This works in most cases but Red Hat also still ships the latest S3 server for the cases in which it does not. Therefore I would suggest installing the S3 server and see if that works better for the cards that you have installed in your systems. Please mount your Red Hat cd and then rpm -Uvh /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/XFree86-S3V-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm and then run Xconfigurator --expert Choose unlisted card from the card list and then choose the S3V server choice. You can then answer the rest of the questions. If this still fails to work reopen the bug and we will have to try and find a S3Virge card of the same revision number that you have because it could have changed with out changing the actual model of the card therrefore causing the failure. ------- Additional Comments From 06/30/99 18:44 ------- Thank you for the advice. The S3V driver worked fine, and the XFree86-SVGA-3.3.3.1-52 did not. Except for the fact that the RedHat Install program does not give users the option to choose the S3V driver, and that for both the board type (S3 Virge/GX) and the chipset on the board (S3 86C385) the specs call for only the SVGA driver, one part of the issue seems resolved. Perhaps a correction in the install program and/or XFree86 documentation and/or the SVGA driver is needed to allow for situations where the stated specs do not work. Still unresolved is the fact that after the S3V driver is turned off and the video is returned to text mode, characters are scattered all over the screen. The screen is basically unreadable except through a great deal of cryptography. I realize that if users are involved with graphics exclusively this is not an issue. However, those of us who would like to switch back and forth for multiple text and graphics log-in sessions are not allowed to, reducing the full usefulness of the Linux package. SH