Puppy hangs at video probe message - Toshiba Portege

[adrian5750]

HI All
I'm a complete newbie to linux / puppy, but many years suffering under Windoze !

Trying to run Puppy (tried 2.16, 2.17 and 3.01) on a Tosh Portege 7020TC with 192meg RAM.

The CDs seem Ok as they will run happily on my main PC.

Boot process gets as far as the Xvesa / Xorg selection - Xorg hangs with the 'probing video' message - Xvesa says 'starting X with video mode 0X0111 and mouse psaux' - but it doesn't.....

Like the look of Puppy on my main PC (amazingly easy to get up & on the web) - and it's be nice to migrate away from Gatesworld.... but at the moment I'm stuck...

I see from the forum that there seems to be an issue with Toshiba laptops - but I'm hoping that there may be a future release of Puppy that addresses this.... I'm not confident enough to start diving into editors and patching out lumps of code...

So - is there any home for me and my poor old tosh laptop ?

Thanks in advance
Adrian

[muggins]

there have been quite a few posts mentioning that to get puppy booting on tosh laptops, people have booted puppy with the nopcmcia option.

if that's the solution in your case, you might want to see this thread:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 73&t=22162

[adrian5750]

HI Muggins

Many thanks for the reply.
Sadly - tried the nopcmcia option and the laptop locked up at the 'Probing video hardware, please wait' stage again...

Shame - had a play with Puppy on my desktop last night -and it's truly amazing compared to XP.

Probably 2 or 3 times faster on web browsing, and I was amazed to see that the 'office'-type apps could happily read existing doc and xls files on the hard disk, and open them !

Just need to sort out this video probing thing.... then we'll be well away!

Thanks
Adrian

[muggins]

adrian5750,

you're more patient than I am. One factor with me becoming puppified, the last few years, was that when I had a toshiba laptop, I tried heaps of different linux versions, and only found two that would see my winmodem & display.

One was big & slow, but the other was puppy. If puppy hadn't of seen my display I would have moved on for sure.

Anyway, all I can suggest is you do a search of the forum for toshiba AND video, to try and narrow it down.

Do you know what graphics you've got?

Also, sometimes you can glean information by searching for your model here:

http://www.linux-laptop.net/ (for any laptop brand)

or here:

http://newsletter.toshiba-tro.de/main/index.html (for toshiba)

[muggins]

I just had a look at http://www.linux-laptop.net/, and found a link for a portege7020ct:

http://www.anja.gerwinski.de/portege7020ct/

which says it has a neomagic chipset. if you do a forum search for neomagic that might throw some light on the video problem.

[muggins]

OK,

if it is a neomagic chipset that you've got, then these two threads look like they might have the solution:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 78&t=22873

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 78&t=14140

[adrian5750]

HI All

Thanks for the continued assistance....

There is a thread running


http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=22873

that seems to describe the problem that I'm having...

At least, that's how I understand it <g>

Unfortunately, from the info given in the thread, it's clear that I don't know enough about Puppy to even start to implement the solution - so I've tagged onto the end of that thread in the hope that one of the experts there takes pity on me <g>

Seems to involve downloading a xorgwizard-tecra-trident.tar.gz file - but, having downloaded it, what should I do with it (serious answers only, please!)

Regards
Adrian