Xorg 1.12.3 with OpenChrome 0.2.906 on VIA VT8623 (CLE266): Seg. fault!
 

Hi!

I've been brushing the dust off a rather old computer of mine lately and wonder if it could still be put to some use. In the past it had SuSE 7 and 9 as OS and while it was primarily used as a router, I remember that Xfree86 4.0 with KDE worked on the machine back then.

Right, the machine has little RAM and a rather slow CPU but it should be enough nevertheless. I tested a Lubuntu Live-CD and it won't even load up to the point where you could select the language... Then I threw in a Gentoo minimal-install-CD which also didn't boot. A SystemRescueCD finally did the trick and left me with a working live-system.

However no luck with starting X11. Here's the Xorg.0.log:

According to lspci the graphics card is:

Any ideas on what's happening here and what to do in this case?

It seems that the openchrome driver can't cope with your hardware as is.

In such a case I would try the vesa driver as a fallback.

For this you will need a file which you will call xorg-vesa.conf to be put in /etc/X11 and which include at least:

Or you can rename as /etc/X11/xorg-vesa.conf appended file (included in Slackware 13.37 but which should work with any other distribution as well).

Hi, Didier Spaier!

Sorry for not replying any earlier - I was off for a little longer than intended.

Taking a look at how "actively" developed unichrome is, I shouldn't even hope for a driver fix. So getting vesa to work might still be my best bet.

I had actually tried vesa first and it also does not work (for other reasons though). Because of this I had hoped that unichrome could be persuated on working with my machine - but it seems that this is not the case. Thanks for confirming this!

I guess that your best bet would be to download a driver directly from VIA.

Step 1, either choose linux-legacy or linux-current as OS type.

If you choose linux-current, you will see that a driver for your graphics card (CLE266) is is available only for Ubuntu 8.10. "tar -xf" to untar it, as this is an old archive. Be sure to read the README in it (sorry if all that is obvious for you, just to make sure I don't miss anything).

But if you choose linux-legacy you will find that source packages are available (two pages of information + 4 download links are presented).

Good luck.

It seems that the difference between "legacy" ant "current" (sic!) be that whilst legacy includes the kernel driver, current does not, very probably because nowadays it's already included in the vanilla kernel tree.

I realize that my suggestions in previous thread could be not relevant, as the openchrome driver is supposed to be able to handle your card, so maybe the error in X log is caused by some components of the distribution not fitting well together.

Could you please tell us why vesa didn't work, as this is the usual fallback?

Also if you give more information about your hardware: size of RAM, space on disk and processor (output of "uname -mp"), it will be possible to suggest you another distribution to try.

Hi, Didier Spaier!

Thanks again for your efforts, I appreciate it a lot! I think that my distribution of choice loads a framebuffer by default and that this is blocking the vesa driver for X. The message is:

The distribution I'm talking of is Alpine Linux - something rather unusual since it's a distro with busybox and with µclibc instead of the standard glibc. It's primarily meant for embedded systems, but can of course also be used on a desktop. I like it for several reasons: the (very light-weight) way it is designed, its build and package system, the simple but confortable usage due to the many scripts it offers and of corse because of the extremely low memory usage (Xfce usable with ca. 50 MB of RAM, no joke!). The biggest downside of it is that there are not too many packages available (especially when you're - like me - spoiled by a big distro like Debian) and that µclibc can cause trouble with some programs making those tricky to get them working.

I've only used it in virtual machines so far and wanted to test it on real hardware now. So far I did not have the time to find out how do disable the framebuffer and see if I'm right about vesa. If all else fails, I might try Arch or some other distro on this machine and get another to tinker with Alpine.

And here's the output of uname -mp you asked for:

Since that's not saying much, here's two more:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

and cat /proc/meminfo

P.S.: No problem with you writing things on a rather basic level (like untaring archives). While I'm not a total newbie anymore, I'm still far from having a solid understanding of how Linux works. Plus I found that threads here on LQ are often on the first pages when searching the web for the solution of a problem. So it's probably best to discuss an issue in-depth as it's not completely unlikely that somebody else stumbles upon it somewhen and can possibly benefit from it, too. (Even though THIS particular problem may be not too common considering how old and uncommon my hardware is! :D)

Well, it would help to know which "bound driver" it is and how it is bound :scratch:

Maybe (i.e. if this driver was compiled as a module) we can easiky find its name. Just in case please append lsmod's output, renamed as lsmod.txt to your next message.

Or we can find that in looking at you kernel's config file. If you have it then great, just append it as well, renamed as config.txt.

Else if hopefully it is included in the kernel you can gather it with following command:
In any case to get rid of any framebuffer and of kernel modesetting as well you could try to boot with following command:
To do that just hit TAB when the greetings screen of your boot loader shows then type the command before hitting ENTER.

If that helps you will be able to make this setting permanent. The way to do that depends of which boot loader you use.

Hi, Didier Spaier!

I don't know if you still care for this, but I couldn't reply any earlier since I've lived in another city for a while now and did not have access to the old pc and stuff.

Anyways, here's the output of lsmod:

There seems to be no config.gz or anything similar on my machine. However I found out that it's vt8623fb which is causing the trouble - or at least some of it. If I blacklist it, screen resolution does no longer change during startup. Also the VESA driver also does not complain anymore and Openchrome no longer crashes. But unfortunately X still won't work. I'm just getting my black screen and nothing happens so I have to hit reset.

I'll append three Xorg log files here and hope that they are of any use. The first one is using xf86-video-fbdev (leaving vt8623fb enabled); the others are xf86-video-openchrome and xf86-video-vesa (both having vt8623fb blacklisted).

While I feel that it's getting closer, I still have no idea what is really happening here.

Sorry, I do not see anything in the X logs that could explain why X doesn't start.

Well, I guess, I'll give up on it for now. Thanks a lot for trying to help with my problem, though!