gathering info (video card)

[ele5125]

In order to corectly configure X11 in linux I learned that I need to gather information about my video card and monitor. Upon several fusterating hours I managed to find a user manual for my monitor which is not made anymore. I also managed to gather information about my graphics card. Here is what I found:

Monitor:
Made by DEC (Digital equipment corportation) they merged with HP
Modle number: PCxBV-YA/YX
Multi-Mode include user mode and preset modes.
Horizontal sync rate: 30KHz to 66KHz
Verticle sync rate: 50Hz to 110Hz
Active area: 26.0cm x 19.0cm
15" or 14"
SVGA compatible

Video Card:
Manufacture: s3
Chipset: S3 ViRGE 325
Resolution(s): 640x480, 800x600 @24bpp , 1024x768 @16bpp
Max color depth: 24bpp
Memory: either 2MB or 4MB of SDRAM (to be confirmed)


I have found the web site for s3 www.s3.com and search all over the site for ViRGE 325 spesifications but found nothing, so as a result I dont know what my RAMDAC is.

Do I need to know the RAMDAC to be able to configure my monitor?

If so what would you sugest I do to find the RAMDAC spesification?

I have found billions of sites with information about S3 ViRGE 325 chipset but can't find my RAMDAC

[ele5125]

ok I decided to not choose a RAMDAC or Clock Chip setting when configuring X11 with XF86Config

The results were promising. I type startx and get the same thing I get before windows starts, a small blue box is displayed saying user mode selected and it gives me the horizontal and verticle sync rates and other info, but it crashes afterwords.

After doing some more research I came acros a site with infow about the XF86 progect and its suport for my card, it apears as if my card (S3 ViRGE 325) is not yet suported. Well not yet suported since the time the person made the web site. But I decided that maybe he was talking about a earlyer version so I would give it a try. But I am geting further then before because, I would normaly get a complete black screen whereas this time part of the screen got lighter in color (my brightness and contrast settings) and I get the blue box displaying the user mode that was selected.

So I am getting somewhere, so I decided to go to the home page for XF86 and see if there was an update. I downloaded Xinstall.sh which is a sh script for installing XF*^ from what I understand. I mounted my floppy drive and copyed it to a temp directory in linux then started it

sh Xinstall.sh -check

to check what files I am suposed to download, as directed, but I get an error saying SH Xinstall.sh not found. I did a ls and it is definatly in my directory. But for some reason it wont run.

Any sugestions on how I can fix the problem?

[problemchild]

Ok, question: Is this the same Red Hat 5.2 box you posted about in another thread? If it is, you're using a version of XFree that's going on 5 years old, and I suspect that's the source of most of your troubles. Unless you have some good reason for staying at 5.2, I would really look at upgrading to 7.3. I think 99% of the problems you're running up against will go away. You'll have much smoother sailing and you'll get more out of it.

I get an error saying SH Xinstall.sh not found. I did a ls and it is definatly in my directory. But for some reason it wont run.

The file isn't in your path, so you have to tell the system to look in the current directory. sh ./Xinstall.sh -check should work for you.

[ele5125]

10X problemchild. I was hopeing I could get away with doing an upgrade ofter I had my modem and X11 server working. I did some searching around for upgrading my version of linux and found this

http://www.redhat.com/support/resour...ernel-upgrade/

So I am downloading the rpm packages now. Thanks so much for the advice. I new it was a old kernel I had but when I compared my version numbers to those in the ftp site I found a major difernce.

<NEW QUESTION>

EDIT: Quick question about the rpm packages, my initial thought was to grab the rpms from the directory for RedHat 7.3 but I noticed the version number for the kernel rpms in the 5.2 directory are also high. Do I choose the 7.3 directory or the 5.2 directyory?

</NEW QUESTION>

[ele5125]

ok, I dowloaded the kernel rpms and the xfree86 as well as mkinitrd and rpm packages

I go to upgrade my rpm with:

rpm -Uvh rpm*rpm

i did that from the directory where my new rpm packages are.

I get the eror:

Failed dependancies:

and it lists things like:

libz.so.1 is needed by rpm-4.0.4-7x

ext...

So obviouly it is trying to tell me it needs those files for rpm to work. I am following the instructions at

http://www.redhat.com/support/resour...ernel-upgrade/

How can I upgrade my rpm?

I need the latest version of rpm so I can install the latest version of the kernel and stuff

Please help.