[ILUG] Trident Blade 64

[Declan Moriarty]

Was it John McDonnell who wrote on Thursday 14 March 2002 08:27:
> morning folks,
> I have a problem here that has me bamboozled. I upgraded my graphics card
> to a Jetway Blade T64 AGP card (Trident Blade hcipset) from an SiS 6326
> PCI card. 

ANYTHING is better than the SiS 6326!

> I went through the Xconfigurator hoops (on RH 7.2) and it came
> up with 800x600 which was sucky but at least usable. The I tried it again
> to see if I could up the resolution. Now, I get nothing - well, I can just
> about manage to get a very fuzzy 640x480 that is completely unusable and
> monkeys with my console settings.
> Anyone seen this before or know how to fix it?

Fuzzy - is this fuzzy(blurred) fuzzy(Lines across, or what? The first is a 
monitor problem, the second interlacing.

First of all, when sorting this sort of thing, do the obvious: Have you 
shifted from pci card to agp? Is your pc talking nicely to the agp slot? I 
had some BIOS settings that screwed that up for me. Have you given the 
maximum possible dotclock for the card, horiz. & vert frequencies for the 
monitor? Have you killed off any fancy options for the SiS card (fast_vram 
etc, etc)?

I would resort to using XF86Config, instead of XF86Config-4. That has a 
standard set of modelines, and you can hack these by hand. This one

# 640x480 @ 60 Hz, 31.5 kHz hsync
Modeline "640x480"     25.175 640  664  760  800   480  491  493  525

should be your monitor setting for a console, unless you have a vga= line in 
lilo or whatever you use. That should work on any box. You'll want 640x480, 
800x600, 1024x768, mebbe 1280x1024. Check your max monitor frequencies, and 
go in with the fastest lines under it. Use no interlaced modes (X finds 
excuses to reject them). Cut XF86Config to those 3 0r 4 lines
then:
# startx >xerrors 2>&1
# less xerrors

What's going on? check all 3 modes with Ctrl_Alt_+.  Let us know and we'll 
sort it. If you're unemployed, totally idle, and insomniac, and a compulsive 
reader, you could read the video timings HOWTO, which would be the 'TFM'  in 
'RTFM'.
>
> I'm not looking forward to the wife's reaction when I tell her she has to
> ssh from my Mac to use the Linux box :-/

Don't worry. She'll love to see you caught out this way.
-- 
	Regards,


	Declan Moriarty




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