Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[Jazzzy]

I have old laptop with Neomagic graphic card that operates on unusual resolution 800x480. I've tried to start Puppy but it failed to load graphic mode
and I have no idea where and what to check or patch to have Puppy working. There is no MC nor xorg.conf and I'm newbie so please advise me what to do.

[danleff]

There are multiple posts on this topic. Bladehunter has created a version of Puppy that should work with the NeoMagic video. See his announcement here.

But the question is, how much ram is in this old laptop? You need at least 64 mb of ram to run Puppy. If your laptop takes some of the ram for video (and many old lappys do), then you need more.

[Jazzzy]

[Guest]

My version has XFree and you should be able to configure for that resolution

[Jazzzy]

I've downloaded cd-puppy.iso, next unpacked files vmlinuz, image.gz and usr_cram.fs. Then I launched

linld.com image=vmlinuz initrd=image.gz cl=@puppy.lin

puppy.lin contains

root=/dev/ram0
PFILE=pup001-none-262144

and it does not work, above configuration works with files from original puppy but not with this modified. I've tried many configuration options and I always got this error

[Guest]

ramdisk_size=16384 has to be passed to the kernel as it was compiled with a smaller ramdisk than actually required



have a look at isolinux.cfg on the cdrom (or in the iso) that will give you an idea.

[Jazzzy]

[Guest]

I dont know about the difference in syntax between Xorg and XFree...I imagine there would be some...Have you tried

#X -configure


It maybe able to automagically configure your card

[Guest]

Thanks for Bladehunter's framebuffer Puppy which is required for some old laptops only accepting framebuffer mode.

There are two types of bootloader. One type, e.g. syslinux reads into the boot sector whether the boot sector is on hard drive partition, floopy disk, CDROM or USB flash drive. The other type kicks in from DOS. Tiny.exe, linld.com, etc. are this type. I tried with tiny.exe and linld.com and could not start xwin. It was due to this type of bootloader not communicating with veasfb which is used for the framebuffer mode. If the small penguin is not displayed on the top of the screen when booting the kernel, this indicates vesafb is not activated.

There is a DOS version of GRUB which works with vesafb. Since 800x600 is not the setting in Bladehunter's Puppy, the vga parameter on the kernel command line has to be changed as well.

[Guest]

Just to clear up something

The last 3 releases I put out DO NOT use Frambuffer, they use a cutdown installation of XFree86....I found frambuffer was too slow and jerky