I have an elderly laptop machine which I use as an emergency backup and for occasional experimentation. It must run X for accessibility reasons.
It was running Debian but repeated problems from updates breaking the system leads me to try again to get BSD working.
freeBSD is basically installed.
Lots of things are dodgy but fixable. Network, keyboard, mouse, power, nothing too difficult.
X is a whole different game and I want to prove that can work. (just the video, other parts are easy)
Right now X is dead.
X under freeBSD does report roughly the correct video hardware (I say roughly because this is one confusing heap of hardware device)
A web search finds there is a specific freeBSD driver
xf86-video-s3virge / X.Org s3virge display driver
This does not appear on disk search, but would it?
I seem to recall Debian works provided that driver is _not_ used, fbdev I think it was. Linux must be told to use framebuffer before boot.
-configure blah blah, all done
The debug log shows no errors, just warnings about mouse and keyboard. Not worried about those.
It probes using different drivers then seems to succeed with vesa. Gives resource ranges which look to me like low memory mapping. If so looks sane. PCI detail matches card detect.
That is hopeful.
Conf.new contains no named devices. Test of course is lockup time.
"Screen0" (0)
"Monitor0"
"Card0"
Any ideas on where to go from here?
It was running Debian but repeated problems from updates breaking the system leads me to try again to get BSD working.
freeBSD is basically installed.
Lots of things are dodgy but fixable. Network, keyboard, mouse, power, nothing too difficult.
X is a whole different game and I want to prove that can work. (just the video, other parts are easy)
Right now X is dead.
X under freeBSD does report roughly the correct video hardware (I say roughly because this is one confusing heap of hardware device)
A web search finds there is a specific freeBSD driver
xf86-video-s3virge / X.Org s3virge display driver
This does not appear on disk search, but would it?
I seem to recall Debian works provided that driver is _not_ used, fbdev I think it was. Linux must be told to use framebuffer before boot.
-configure blah blah, all done
The debug log shows no errors, just warnings about mouse and keyboard. Not worried about those.
It probes using different drivers then seems to succeed with vesa. Gives resource ranges which look to me like low memory mapping. If so looks sane. PCI detail matches card detect.
That is hopeful.
Conf.new contains no named devices. Test of course is lockup time.
"Screen0" (0)
"Monitor0"
"Card0"
Any ideas on where to go from here?
You can also install the package with 'pkg_add -r xf86-video-s3virge', but only do that if you installed Xorg the same way (ie. if you didn't install Xorg from the ports tree).