On Thursday, July 17, 2003 9:01 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> From: Andy Goth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > > (WW) VESA(0): Bad V_BIOS checksum
> >
> > I wonder if this is causing us problems.
>
> Yeah, I don't know either. If this means "video bios", then who provides
> it: the motherboard manufacturer or nVidia?
I don't know the particulars of V_BIOS, but with software/firmware checksums
in general, a bad checksum doesn't necessarily mean corrupted
software/firmware, but it does mean there's no way of verifying that it is
correct, or rather, was correctly read. It usually means the original
manufacturer was careless.
> And which of those two BIOS's contain the VESA mode definitions?
V_BIOS I would imagine.
> > VESA doesn't use modelines.
>
> Thanks for the tip.
I checked the VESA source, too, and there are no modeline-related code or
comments anywhere that I could see. If there are, then they're hidden behind
some generic XFree86 library call that I didn't bother to trace.
> > > (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode "1280x1024" (width too large for
> > > \ virtual size)
> > > (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode "1024x768" (width too large for \
> > > virtual size)
> > > (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode "800x600" (width too large for \
> > > virtual size)
> > > (II) VESA(0): Not using built-in mode "640x480" (width too large for \
> > > virtual size)
> >
> > 640? Too wide!?
>
> Yup, seems a little odd to me too.
So how does this virtual size parameter get determined, anyway? What happens
if you explicitly set it with the Virtual entry in the Display subsection of
the Screen section?
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4:
[...]
Section "Screen"
[...]
SubSection "Display"
[...]
Virtual 1024x768
[...]
EndSubSection
[...]
EndSubSection
[...]
> > looks good but futzes up the bottom row of text on your screen. Is it an
> > 80x25 screen? What's the character size in pixels? 9x16? What happens
> > if
>
> (Using the "nv" driver...)
>
> The vc shows me 100 columns and 37 rows (where the last row is the one
> that's half chopped off)
>
> I don't know anything about how to determin character size in pixels, or
> how to control the fonts used on VCs. Care to enlighten me?
One way to determine the size by visually counting pixels. Except with
LCD-type screens, logical pixels are often spread around to fill multiple
physical pixels, so you'll instead have to count little rectangles, which
gets quite hard due to blurry edges.
Adjust the font (therefore font size) with setfont.
> > you set a smaller font? Have you tried SVGATextMode? fbcon?
>
> I don't know what SVGATextMode or fbcon are.
SVGATextMode programs your video hardware to display an arbitary text mode
given modelines and clocking information. It needs to support your hardware,
though, so you might not get anything more than generic VGA modes, which then
again might not be so bad.
fbcon is a Linux kernel driver for using a framebuffer (pixel matrix) rather
than a text matrix for its console display. You may have seen boot-time
penguins on other people's computers. fbcon allows this. I think it's still
marked "experimental" but I'm not sure. Get fbset to enable acceleration and
to select different modes.
--
Andy Goth | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://ioioio.net/
Engineers love to change things.
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