*BSD News Article 19295


Return to BSD News archive

Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.questions:4319 comp.windows.x.i386unix:2956
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!waikato!comp.vuw.ac.nz!duncan
From: duncan@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Duncan McEwan)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.windows.x.i386unix
Subject: Problems running XS3-0.3 on various S3 cards
Date: 9 Aug 1993 06:45:54 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Comp. Sci., Victoria Uni. of Wellington, New Zealand.
Lines: 61
Message-ID: <244rr2$6jv@st-james.comp.vuw.ac.nz>
NNTP-Posting-Host: bats.comp.vuw.ac.nz

I'm having problems getting XS3 running on a couple of S3 based cards that I
currently have on loan.  Unfortunately, I don't have much documentation about
either card.  I do know that both are S3 911 based -- one is a GainTEC GXA911
and other other is something called a "WA911".  Both cards are ISA.

The symptoms are identical for both.  I type "startx -- XS3 >& errs"; the
screen flickers and then goes blank, and then nothing...

The system (NetBSD 0.8 with NetBSD-current kernel) is still running - I can
rlogin across the network, but anything I type on the keyboard is ignored
(including <ctrl-alt-backspace> and <ctrl-alt-delete>).

When I look in the errs file I see the following

| S3 1.0 / X Windows System
| (protocol Version 11, revision 0, vendor release 5000)
| 
| S3
| We are about to initialize the S3 
| S3 chipset is a 911 
| 0  63
| 1  4f
| 2  52
| 3  98
| ...
| 6e  ff
| We are exiting S3 initialization 

Between the 3 and the 6e are 106 lines containing different hex digits, that
I can send to someone if they will be useful in diagnosing the problem. 
(Note, I get similar output regardless of which S3 card I use, but some of
the numbers are different).

The VGA and ModeDB sections of my Xconfig file looks like this:

| #
| # First the colour driver
| #
| vga256
|   viewPort	0 0
|   modes	"640x480"
| 
| ModeDB
| # OFFICIAL VESA Monitor timings + IBM Standards - TRY THESE FIRST
| # Contributor:          Thomas Roell [roell@sgcs.com]
| # Last Edit Date:       3/29/92
| #
| # name        clock   horizontal timing     vertical timing      flags
| "640x480"     0      640  664  760  800    480  491  493  525
|               1      640  664  704  832    480  489  492  520

I have replaced the clock field with index values rather than actual clock
values (according to Amancio, this is required for XS3), but one thing I
am not certain about is how I am supposed to know which clock values corespond
to which index values.  That is, since XS3 doesn't seem to print out what
clocks the card has, how do I know that clock index 0 has the value 25,
index 1 has 31, etc...

Thanks in advance for any help that people can give me...

Duncan