sis 651 xvideo/virtual terminal problems under X

[Robert Rankin]

I'm having some niggles with . I originally used slackware-current 9.0
where the driver in x allowed me to use xvideo, etc etc. but I got
greedy, and after using swaret, badly mucked up my system, and then my
/boot partition fell apart. I had heard good things about gentoo and made
the move, Its been a steep learning curve for me. I run it with the
latest vanilla kernel 2.6.5(Winischhofer's latest fixes 2.6.3) although I
have only been using xfree 4.3 as Winischhofer's latest fixes are not
availble in these I have merrly been using the generic framebuffer
driver(no Xvideo). Last thursdat(8th April 2004) I got a new monitor, one
of those LCD 20.1" Flatron L2010P. The main reason why I forked out the
extra cash over the 19" was the extra resolution 1600x1200. The picture
looks great, although the screen was only running at 60hz and was happy
with that, but new Thomas Winischhofer had made many changes to his
drivers in xfree 4.4. The problems regarding the xfree licence means that
there would be no upgrade coming for some time. but xorg have release
there own version of X based on the almost xfree 4.4 release. So I took
the plunge used the sis drivers, fantastic, 75Hz and pretty as a picture
I have some problems with my keyboard, and with the fonts, although
everyone is experiencing some of these, and I have seen fixes. My
problems are I have lived with out Xv(Xvideo) for a long time, and it
seems to work again-ish, but when i enable it in gxmame/xine nothing is
displayed just red crosses(blue screen in xine , and I haven't seen that
coulour in a long time), I'm sure I fixed this before but cannot remember
how, also my monitor rotates(got it for pac-man) but I cannot get x to
rotate; krandr just shows unenabled options; randr errors although I
suspect I'm not using it right. When I use xorg-11/xfree 4.4 I my virtual
terminals(is that right) when I press Alt-Ctrl-(1 to 8) give me streaked
lines. When I use sisfb which I compile statically in the kernel, which
seems to change successfully the modes to 800x600x8, when I try an append
line video=sisfb:mode:1600x1200x16 It just says option sisfb 1600x1200x8
and does nothing obvious if at all(sisfb does not show when I use lsmod).
Although It has little use in my daily use of linux, I would want the
penguin at startup to show and I suspect it would fix swapping into my
virtual consoles.

sis drivers - http://www.winischhofer.net/linuxsisvga.shtml

x11 licence x - http://freedesktop.org/XOrg

any help would be lovely, XF86Config/xorg.conf example files accepted or
taylored .config files > kernel 2.6.3, or successful changes to
lilo.conf(sisfb append line)

[Robert Rankin]

Xvideo will only work at 60Hz on a 16bit 1600x1200 resolution due to memory bandwith?? on the chip(166mHz) not 75 Mhz and only at about 640x480 at 24bit, the red x's are a feature to show you this.

The garbled text in the framebuffer console is due to a bug in the driver if the sisfb if framebuffer console is not compiled into the kernel. mine was in as a module

Rotating the screen to get x to rotate add
# Option "ShadowFB"
# Option "Rotate" "CCW"
although you can see I have these commented this is becuase krandr does not recognise xorg-x11

as for the console well I added video=sisfb:mode:1600x1200x16,mem:16384,rate:60 and I get 70x200 as my font resolution and it looks pretty, and very usefull it is indeed although his line expects to be at the start. Although still no penguin I just get a white square, but I am not bitter.