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DISCLAIMER: All the information contained in this page, or any linked from it, is provided as is, having no warranty or support of any kind, and is used entirely at your own risk.
X Windows
All of the C1Vx Picturebooks come with a 1024x480 LCD, which is not supported by any out of the box X config that I am aware of, with one exception which is the frame buffer config that comes with Slackware, and this is very very slow so is not recommended. Anyway all is not lost it can be done, and here is the HOWTO section, also included is my config file, just to make life easier. Before I forget again, if you have come straight to this document, you may like to know that its only a part of the much larger HOWTO, the starting point is here. It covers all the configuration for this machine in some detail, so if you have other problems you may find help there.
Slackware 8
Slackware 8, comes with X4.10 which does work on this system out of the box, but as I said above its running with a Frame Buffer config which is terribly slow and so not worth much. X 4.01 which is included in some versions of the Redhat distribution, can be made to work but its not a straightforward thing to do, it needs a patch to the source for the ATI X server and a hack to the XF86Config file. For more on this one and another Vaio HOWTO, look at this page
While its possible to make older versions work, a far better solution is to use 4.1.0, as its better, smaller, faster etc, and does support the ATI chip correctly without needing to hack the server source code. This is the way that I am going to talk about here.
X4.2
You will notice that I have not mentioned the latest version of X? this is by design, there are problems with this version on the Picturebook. If you use that version the screen wraps, and so far I have not been able to find a solution to this. Be warned...
Building from Source
I will go through building X 4.1.0 from the source code as to get the optimizations for the Crusoe CPU, not the i386 that some of the binaries are compiled for.
What You Need
First get the source tarballs, you get these from ftp.xfree86.org or one of the many mirrors, the files you need are :-
X410src-1.tar.gz
X410src-2.tar.gz
X410src-3.tar.gz
Be warned these are not small files to download, so I suggest a local/fast mirror. If you are in Australia goto ftp.planetmirror.com
Uncompressing
OK now you have these files, uncompress them all in the same directory, which will create a new directory called xc. Under this there is the whole source tree. You uncompress them like this.
tar xvfz X410src-1.tar.gz
You need to repeat this for the other 2 files. After this change into this new xc directory.
TIP: For help with handling compressed files under Linux/Unix/OSX see my HOWTO, which covers most of the common formats in detail.
Compiling
Now its time to compile it, the first thing to do is read the documentation for the distribution, this is in the INSTALL-X.org file, which lives in the root of the source tree. Now you may want to edit the configuration files as detailed in this file, to customize for your site. I tested the 4.1.0 build with all the defaults and it runs without error on the Picturebook, so if you are in a hurry just build it with the following command :-
make World
This will have a very long time, in the order of hours. So its coffee time again....
Installing
When this build has finished, its time to install the newly built 4.1.0, to do this use the following command :-
make install
this will actually do the installation, its much quicker than the build, but still in the order of 10+ minutes.
Configuration
For the configuration of X, it uses the good old XF86Config that lives in the /etc/X11 dir. I used xf86config (note the case change!) to create a config file, which does work unmodified, only snag the resolution looks like 640x480, not good. Anyway you need to add the correct mode line for the LCD, which I was about to calculate until I found it on Steve Barr's site. The magic modeline is shown below :-
ModeLine "1024x480" 65.00 1024 1032 1176 1344 480 488 494 563 -hsync -vsync
Links and Related Pages
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