Ibm 701c and framebuffer trouble
 

Hello there.

I have an IBM 701c 'Butterfly' laptop. I have Slackware 10 running on it.
It uses the Chips And Tech CT65545 chipset, and it is capable of doing 640x480@256 colors on the screen. And 1024x768 if i hook up an external monitor.
Now, my trouble is that I can not for the love of god get the framebuffer to work.
I use lilo as my bootloader, and i have this in it:

However, when i boot with whatever videomode i select (a couple of new ones appear if i choose to scan), the framebuffer does not get started, however if i chose 132x50 as the videomode, the text goes over the edge of the screen.
Now, I'm pretty sure the grafics card is vesa2.0 compliant, as it says so in the spreadsheet. So that shouldn't be the problem.
The odd thing is, i had debian woody installed, and i saw the little penguin when i booted, so it has to be able to work. I just can't for the love of godmake it work. Argh.
My dmseg dosen't show anything relating to framebuffer or vesa, and it just prints that the console is 80x25 as normal.
Now. Does anyone have an idea as what could be the problem?
The slackware standard kernel does have support for framebuffer, so that shouldn't be the problem.
I hope one of you know :) Thanks in advance.

Anders

did you try to set vga with decimal value instead of hexadecimal ?
in this case 0x301=769

So try vga=769 to see...

Ah yes, I wrote the wrong number in the first post. I use GRUB on my primary workstation, and confused the two. I have tried with vga=769

for grub, try to put all setting in one line like :

kernel /vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda2 vga=769 video=vesa:ywrap,mtrr

or try to remove video=vesa:ywrap,mtrr if that fails again

You misunderstood me, I use lilo for the laptop. I just mixed the setting up with the one from my GRUB config on my main workstation.
I have tried both without and with the "video=vesa:ywrap,mtrr" part, and no luck.
Seeing as it has worked with Debian woody 2.4.18-kernel, I would think that it is a kernel problem. And I'd rather not have to recompile the kernel, as it is a 75MHz, and it would take forever.
I should say that I have tried with both the 2.6 and 2.4 kernel of Slackware.

You have to recompile kernel with the proper vesa module, but why not compile it in a fast machine than insall it in the laptop ?

To be honest, I'm not quite sure how I would go about doing that.
I know how to compile the kernel, but what about modules etc. that need to be copied over?
I guess I should go and find out how to do that..
Also, you wouldnt happen to know what VESA module is needed?

You could compile the kernel, then do not make modules_install but repack the kernel directory :

tar czvf kernel.tar.gz <kernel directory>

the copy it in laptop, untar it, cd into it and run make modules_install, then make the final kernel install steps

For kernel 2.6.7, here are features that enable framebuffer :

CONFIG_FB=y
CONFIG_FB_VESA=y
CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_FONTS=y
CONFIG_FONT_8x8=y
CONFIG_FONT_8x16=y

# optional
CONFIG_LOGO=y
CONFIG_LOGO_LINUX_MONO=y
CONFIG_LOGO_LINUX_VGA16=y
CONFIG_LOGO_LINUX_CLUT224=y

I see, but I believe that those options are already compiled in, is that correct?
Edit:
(And I'm running 2.4, is the options the same?)

Not the CONFIG_FB_VESA=y I think. With kernel compile you are sure that framebuffer is compiled as built in so it load fine at boot.

I am looking at the /boot/config-ide-2.4.26 config file now, and that option is infact set..
That would mean it *should* work if I'm not mistaken. However, it just dosent.

I did forget that it works well with 2.4 slackware kernel. Could you post your lilo config, (complete or the boot section part) to make sure ?

Sure, this is the part that boots the kernel:

try :
append="vga=769"
to see...

Lilo's not able to use vga=xxx in the APPEND="" funktion, it wants it in a seperate funktion..