[SOLVED] Is slackware feasible on COMPAQ SR5240AN?
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I have been considering setting up slackware on my HP COMPAQ SR5240AN (it has been a great success on my laptop).
Before going ahead, I tested with Puppy 5.20 but it found no specific video driver. Although Xorg has a 1440x900 setting, the resulting desktop was oversized and the graphics quality was poor (text being almost illegible). I could tweak the horizontal and vertical refresh rates to make the desktop slightly undersized but could do nothing about the quality.
A check of the HP website revealed that there are absolutely no Linux based video drivers for this machine (they must be joined at the hip with Microsoft) nor anywhere else on the net.
Is there a way around the video problem or is my desktop doomed to be burdened with vista for the rest of it's life?
The monitor is a COMPAQ WF1907
and the microsoft driver is CPQ_WF1907.icm
If this is your computer http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport...riesId=3548178 and you have an onboard video card (Where you connect the monitor will be with all the other connections and not lower down) then you have Nvidia graphics.
If it is an integrated geforce 6xxx GPU, I don't know why Puppy would have such an issue, but there are three drivers that should work with that video card at the monitors native resolution: nv, nouveau, and nvidia. And they all work with Slackware 13.1.
If it is an integrated geforce 6xxx GPU, I don't know why Puppy would have such an issue, but there are three drivers that should work with that video card at the monitors native resolution: nv, nouveau, and nvidia. And they all work with Slackware 13.1.
Your post came up while I was doing more research. The only other puppy related info I could tell you is that when the initial puppy boot up screen came up (the one that lasts 5 seconds) the text was overflowing on the LHS (but during the boot sequence, the text was positioned correctly).
Puppy problems not withstanding, is it worth trying slackware just in case it works or is more research needed?
You can always draw on Pat Volkerding's personal experience! From the Slackware 13.1-current ChangeLog
Quote:
Sun Nov 14 23:58:42 UTC 2010
...
x/mesa-7.9-i486-1.txz: Upgraded.
I was on the fence with this upgrade, and in fact it sat in /testing for
days with mesa-7.8.2 queued instead. But it seems the Intel driver really
does need this version of Mesa or there are major problems with compositing
(most of them leading to an X server crash).
If X crashes at start, try disabling compositing. Create a file named
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/disable-composite.conf with this in it:
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection
The machine that had issues here was using an onboard nVidia 6150SE.
Using the nv, nouveau, or even the vesa driver, X crashed at start unless
compositing was disabled. However, everything works perfectly when using
the binary nVidia drivers, and odds are that most users with decent nVidia
hardware are doing just that. So, that's the situation with nVidia and
Mesa as observed here for now. Hopefully the defaults will work better
soon, but meanwhile if you have nVidia hardware you may have to either
disable compositing or obtain and use nVidia's binary drivers.
As it turned out, all I had to do was install puppy's nvidia package. Now the screen is rock solid and clear as a bell.
I just love how everything suddenly happens instantly instead of having to wait for ages (except my internet connection which has been temporarily slowed down to 64 Kb/s).
Once I have backed up 3 years worth of data I will be definitely installing slack.
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