Hello all, thanks for reading the first post of a newbie.

I'm having some difficulty getting svgalib working under slackware 12.1. My purpose in svgalib is to run Qemu.

I first tried downloading the source from svgalib.org since 1.4.3 was the stable release that's what I downloaded. I had to make lots of patches to get the stuff to compile but eventually succeeded. When I started up Qemu my keyboard was locked.

Started poking around and realized that the "alpha" release 1.9.25 was preferred so I downloaded source for this. Only a couple of compile errors, removed 2 include file references and changed one #define (SA_SHIRQ I think).

Now Qemu won't start (neither will demo svgalib programs) says svgalib_helper not installed or no /dev/svga.

After more searching I realize that you can get a package from packages.slackware.it already compiled. So I download svgalib from
current slackware (yes, a mistake, should have been 12.1) and install it.
Since I'm a newbie I don't immediately realize that the numbers don't match my kernel.

Same problem, no /dev/svga or helper not installed. I try mknod -m 666 /dev/svga c 209 0 does not help, this device is always erased on reboot.

Finally find the right package on packages.slackware.it for 12.1 that matches my kernel. Install it, same problem, try mknod also does nothing.

Any ideas? Have I messed things up with all these twists and turns? Anyone else have experience with 12.1 and svgalib?

Should I re-install OS and go straight to pre-built package?

Thanks.

To a degree I've already answered my own question.

Apparently there is another patch for the svgalib kernel to remove a static declaration from a variable.

Then I forced loading the module via /etc/rc.d/rc.modules.

So now /dev/svga and /dev/svga1 are there.

Many of the svgalib demo programs work (some don't, some hang computer).

Qemu says "could not open SDL display"

You could have got qemu and kqemu for Slackware 12.1 from here:
http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slac...qemu/pkg/12.1/

1) Are you sure that Qemu shouldn't be configured in any specific way to use svgalib ?
2) Are you sure that your libSDL can work with svgalib automatically?
3) Are you sure that qemu supports svgalib or SDL with svgalib?

Try searching for qemu svgalib
From what I found, qemu simply doesn't support svgalib.

Thanks for the pointers.

I did try Alien Bob's build of QEMU - I get a "segmentation fault" in all cases. I've been using the binary download from bellard.org.

I only thought svgalib was required since QEMU kept giving me an error that svgalib_helper was not installed. Of course I suppose this is coming from SDL rather than QEMU.

At the moment if I set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11 I get "could not initialize SDL" instead of the error about not opening the display.

I guess at this point I'm in the wrong forum.