GH> Thank you very much for your answeer. So from what I read from you
GH> I would say that for an installer it would be better to use the
GH> old XF86_FBDev since one does not need in this case to use the new
GH> fancy features and from your words we get the impressions that the
GH> old one could even run on some exotic video cards, right ?
For an x86 installer, it may be best to use the Xvesa server, which
requires no configuration whatsoever (except the resolution, passed on
the server's command line), and will run on basically all x86
hardware, even hardware not supported by the kernel's vesafb driver
(such as VBE 1.2 and plain VGA or EGA).
A colleague of mine has been working on a ``works out of the box''
Linux distribution. At boot time, he asks the user for the
resolution, and writes an XF86Config file; he then attempts to run the
normal XFree86 server. If that fails, he falls back to the Xvesa
server.
The only issue is with the mouse driver. Xvesa can currently be
compiled to have a PS/2 driver, or else a MS serial driver, but not
both simultaneously. The colleague is using gpm in repeater mode if
he detects anything else than PS/2 or USB.
It would not be difficult to add support for weird framebuffer formats
to either the XFree86 fbdev driver or the KDrive Xfbdev server.
However, nobody sees much point in doing that now that the Xvesa
server is available for obsolete hardware.
Juliusz
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