FC3 on Thinkpad 600E weird video
 

For those of you who were following my installation adventures recently, I finally got ahold of a working internal CDROM (yeah!) for my IBM Thinkpad 600E and installed FC3.

During setup, the neomagic video adapter was detected fine, but I had to tell it during the final phase of setup that it is a 1024x768 LCD panel. Even at that setting, it only gave me the options of 640x480 or 800x600. I shrugged and selected 800x600, figuring that I would simply get a small picture with bars around it (stretch is turned off) and change it later.

Now that installation is complete, the system boots perfectly all the way to (and including) the graphical login, but once the graphical login is complete, things get strange.

I get a screen that is kind of an odd text screen with a "window" for an analogue clock and another "window" with a shell in it.

Typing startx reports that the xserver is already running for display 0 (presumably the LCD) and reports a fatal error, then takes me back to a prompt.

Huh?

TIA

Quick update and a *bump* to go with it:

What I seem to be dealing with is a failsafe window manager. At the graphical login, I can click the "session" icon down at the bottom and I will have 3 choices: KDE, Failsafe, and Default. My default is obviously Failsafe. Selecting KDE gets me where I want to be.

What I need to know is how to change the default to KDE so I don't have to go in and manually select it each time I login.

Also, I went ahead and changed my video driver as directed here in hopes that it would cure my resolution issue: The native resolution for my LCD is 1024x768, but I only have 800x600 and below available to me, which looks really dumpy. How do I get KDE running at 1024x768?

Contrary to what Mr. Alford says, though, the sound does NOT work:tisk:, and I will be needing help with it, but we will get there later.

All help is, as always, much appreciated.

TIA

Using the link that you have provided Mr. Alford wrote:

Fixing the Xorg neomagic driver
The Thinkpad 600e has a neomagic video card. Unfortunately, the Fedora Core 3 X11 system is Xorg 6.8.1-12, which comes with a severely crippled neomagic driver. Anything involving scrolling of text is seriously impaired: slow and jerky, with heavy use of CPU time. Luckily the solution is simple: get the good old XFree86 driver back. Download neomagic_drv.o from the XFree86 website (or this local copy) and copy it to /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/. (First make a backup copy of your original version.)

You may also need to restrict yourself to 16bit color by modifying /etc/X11/xorg.conf, setting "DefaultDepth" to 16 in the "Screen" section, and making sure there is a "Depth 16" subsection.

Using that info you should go and check your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Underneath the screen section you need to make sure that the new driver is listed as the one being use as well as setting the DefaultDepth to 16. I found a copy of an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file that I had for an older Dell laptop that I had. The section appropriate to this issue is as follows:

Section "Device"
Identifier "NeoMagic"
Driver "neomagic"
BoardName "Unknown"
# Option "Rotate"
# Option "pciBurst"
# Option "ShadowFB"
# Option "NoStretch"
# Option "LcdCenter"
# Option "externDisp" # Uncomment this for external video
Option "internDisp" # Uncomment this for internal video
Option "overrideValidateMode"
# Option "noMMIO"
# Option "SWcursor"
# Option "NoAccel"
# Option "NoLinear"
# Option "XaaNoScanlineImageWriteRect"
# Option "XaaNoScanlineCPUToScreenColorExpandFill"
EndSection


Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "NeoMagic"
Monitor "Dell SyncMaster 17GLi"
DefaultColorDepth 16
Subsection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubsection

Obviously the Dell specific info will need to be changed but the other info should help. To get the 1024x768 resolution you will need to make sure you put it under modes like it is above.

I hope this helps you out.

Got it, thanks.

Now on to the next problem, in a new thread.

I'm not sure which forum to put it in. Anyone want to lay odds that the moderator moves it?

I know this thread is old, but I thought I would just add that on Slackware 12 all you have to do is run xorgsetup and then change the default color depth to 16. You should be using the neomagic driver after running xorgsetup.

There is also a good page to check out on the ThinkWiki.