[lug] X won't work!!

[John Karns]

I don't recall having such a difficult time with a Linux setup for a few
years now...  I'm inclined to believe that the mobo is the culprit here.  
Yesterday it seemed like it was almost functional - I could get 640 out of
it anyway.  But in the process of trying for 800 and 1024, I was having to
reboot a lot due to system hangs in testing the higher resolutions.  Both
Trident chips (see below) are listed in the X Card doc as being
compatible.  I don't need or want an expensive card, I just want decent
graphics under X (and vmware).  

Pertinent info:

SuSE 6.4 - also tried Mandrake 7.0
Asus P5A mobo
128Mb RAM
AMD K6-II 500Mhz
Generic card w/ Trident Blade3D 8Mb, or Trident 3DImage 975 4Mb, both AGP
3Com 3c905C 10/100 ethernet
Am using SVGA X server

Anyone out there have experience with the Trident cards?  Asus mobos? -
I've installed several machines using this mobo with no problems, but they
were set up without graphics - just a monochrome card and monitor.
 
If I could find a PCI version of one of these cards I'd try it.  Perhaps
there are some quirks with the AGP ports on these mobo's?

I have an identical mobo that I'm setting up for a LAN server 
installation that I'm going to assemble in the morning, 

This is a new system I'm putting together for my own use. When I try to
configure X with this system, it hangs the system.  I can't ping it or
anything else.  Ctrl-Alt-Bksp doesn't get out of X.  I'm unable to gain
any control via the SysReq key sequences, such as sync, unmount, and
reboot.

What I've tried:

  Playing with various BIOS settings (there aren't too many that are
relevant to video), such as Video BIOS shadow, VGA palette snoop,
etc.  

  Tried both SuSE provided kernel and custom compiled with "stock" kernel
source.

  Swapped out the generic Blade 3D card for the Trident 975.

  Tried using XF86Setup, xf86config, sax, isax, sax2 all under SuSE, and 
Xdrake under Mandrake 7.0

  Tried a re-install of SuSE in case the 1st one had gotten botched.

  Tried an early release of X 4.0 


Results: Usually system hang.  At some point I had 640 resoultion
working.  Switching to 800 and 1024 via Ctrl-Alt +/- yielded blank
screens.

Early on in the process XF86Setup was running, as was sax and sax2.  But
switching into graphics mode to test the config almost always resulted in
a system hang.

I've searched the net some and found a site by Rod Smith which gives his
XF86Config file with a Blade3D in a Compaq Presario 1200.  I tried his
mode lines but didn't get any results.  I also found references to
configurations on a site called mail-archive.com containing archives of
the "Linux-Hardware Digest" describing another person's procedure in
setting up a Blade3D.  No dice.  Please help!!

----------------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                              jkarns at csd.net
Bogota, Colombia                                  Voice: 57-1-341-0300