I have a Sager 2850 laptop, specs are PIII 600, 384 MB RAM, 10 gig drive, floppy and CD with a 15 inch viewable lcd. I've tried a TON of linux distros on this laptop before finally settling with slackware 9 RC-2, for certain reasons. I figured I'd stick red hat 8 on to test some stuff.... well for some reason I couldn't get the LCD properly configured with the graphics card ( ATI Rage LT Pro 8meg) Same with mandrake, same with SuSE and many others... anyone else ever have a problem like this? I then stuck slackware on, didn't configure X at all, logged in as a normal user, and typed startx and X started with no issues. Red Hat 7.0 is the only version of redhat that will run on this laptop that I can configure X with. I'm guessing it's something to do with versions of X but I'm not sure. Either way I've had slack on since version 9 rc-2 cause it's the last one for slackware that runs enlightenment :-) Anyone else have this problem before? And if so what did you do to remedy it?

RH 7.0 is using XFree 3.3.6, the old X and a really old ATI driver. Slackware hasn't configured X for you, it just started you with a reallllly generic XF86Config file that uses not the ati driver, but the vesa framebuffer driver. Technically this is a whole lot slower. I tried, unsuccessfully to help someone through this same card on a Mac G3 Powerbook... go figure. If vesa keeps working, keep using it... if you find you want decent 2d or better performance out of mplayer or xine or whathaveyou, try the gatos.sf.net drivers, they apparently handle that card where the straight XFree drivers fail.

Cheers,

Finegan

Well interestingly enough X runs really really good with the framebuffer driver then. I run enlightenment and it runs decently fast even with a ton of apps open and SETI@Home crunching away. I'll probably just end up sticking with this then. Thanks for the input, I'll definatly keep that in mind for future reference.