How I made Xvesa work on old laptop

Problems and successes with specific brands/models of computer video hardware
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tommy
Posts: 133
Joined: Tue 04 Oct 2005, 20:21
Location: Italy

How I made Xvesa work on old laptop

#1 Post by tommy »

That's what I have found to make Xvesa work on a laptop featuring S3 mx + virge 4MB graphic card.
I usually boot puppy on usb stick using a wakepup floppy. On this laptop the boot procedure goes well until I choose Xvesa at the xorgwizard popup message. The screen remains black. If I press alt+f1 the screen reactivates the first console. The pc doesn't hang and it works well in console mode. It just won't let me use xvesa. I cannot use xorg because it hangs this laptop (I have to turn it off). I tried many puppies from 2.01 to turbopup to 4.3.1 with no success.
The strange thing is that if I boot puppy from the CD rom ,xvesa works fine.
I decided to boot puppy on usb using PLOP boot floppy, and xvesa worked fine as if I used a CD rom.
I don't know why this happens - maybe PLOP bypasses the Freedos operating system of the wakepup floppy which interferes with the vesa bus, preventing xvesa to work well (it misses the default screen).

I hope this will be helpful to some puppy lover.
Bye.

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