[ale] Am I insane?

Joseph A. Knapka jknapka at earthlink.net
Tue Aug 27 18:52:28 EDT 2002


Wylde Bill wrote:
> 
> Ah, console.
> 
> Tell me, as I've never tried it, what exactly are the advantages of the fb
> console/fb X?  What kinds of cards will it run on?  How stable is it?

The main advantage is that there's no XF86 configuration to
do. At least on Slack, if you enable fbcon, you can immediately
reboot (with a lovely Tux boot logo) and run 'startx' and
get a working X server. It seems to be as stable as the
SVGA server. It should run on any card for which a framebuffer
driver is available, but I couldn't tell you offhand which
cards that would be. It's worked on the C&T65555 chipset in
my laptop, and on the Cirrus card in one of my desktop machines,
without any configuration work on my part. And I think any
card will work in VGA framebuffer mode.

fbcon is slower, though. Both the text console and X
are slower when run in fb mode. Personally, I don't
notice the difference - I can play Maelstrom on the
fb X server without any trouble.

Strangely, though, while the stock Slack kernel works in
fbcon mode on both my laptop and the desktop I mentioned
above, neither of those machines work in fbcon mode when
I build a custom kernel with fb support -  the kernel
starts to boot and hangs very early on.

-- Joe

> "Joseph A. Knapka" wrote:
> 
> > I am *not* insane!
> >
> > The option to use an fb console appears during the LILO
> > configuration step. I skipped that, planning to install
> > GRUB instead.
> >
> > -- Joe
> >
> > "Joseph A. Knapka" wrote:
> > >
> > > The other day I installed Slackware 8.1 on my laptop, and
> > > at some point it gave be the opportunity to choose a
> > > framebuffer-enabled kernel, and the fb X server. Today, I
> > > am reinstalling Slack 8.1 from scratch on the same machine,
> > > and for the life of me I can't get it to offer me an FB kernel,
> > > nor the xxfb X server.
> > >
> > > WTF?
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > >
> > > -- Joe
> > >   "I'd rather chew my leg off than maintain Java code, which
> > >    sucks, 'cause I have a lot of Java code to maintain and
> > >    the leg surgery is starting to get expensive." - Me
> > >
> > > ---
> > > This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
> > > See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be
> > > sent to listmaster at ale dot org.
> >
> > --
> >   "I'd rather chew my leg off than maintain Java code, which
> >    sucks, 'cause I have a lot of Java code to maintain and
> >    the leg surgery is starting to get expensive." - Me
> >
> > ---
> > This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
> > See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be
> > sent to listmaster at ale dot org.
> 
> --
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> "Here's my family tree.  As far as I can tell, my relatives were carnival folk who
>  were touring this place called Hiroshima in the summer of 1945.  Because they
>  lost most of their hair, they mostly married each other.  And here I am"
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>                                                         (,,oBo,,)
>  Wylde Bill                                               ||||
> __________________________________________           http://lyst.org
> 
> http://mrpooter.sytes.net
> wyldechylde at geocities.com
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- 
  "I'd rather chew my leg off than maintain Java code, which
   sucks, 'cause I have a lot of Java code to maintain and
   the leg surgery is starting to get expensive." - Me

---
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