Yeah, I know. Bad blogger, no cookie.
Blogging’s been light due to the usual confluence of work, school and side projects.
Last night I spent WAY too much time wrangling with a profoundly broken Linux framebuffer driver which could not be brought to heel even with custom mode tables. I eventually gave up and used the old vesafb, which works just fine despite having been originally written for the flight computers in the Apollo spacecraft.
That kind of brokenness drives me right up the goddamn wall, though. It’s 2008. We have 3D desktops so sophisticated they’re on the edge of self-parody, and yet a simple framebuffer driver can’t handle an entirely reasonable request to serve up a 640×480, 60Hz, 8-bit display; it just shits its pants and spews garbage all over the screen on the RARE occasions when it actually snycs up to the monitor. And this isn’t a reverse-engineered driver for undocumented hardware; the driver was WRITTEN BY the people who made the hardware!
On the bright side, I had ample opportunities to confirm that the “video out of range” damage-protection circuitry in my monitor does its job.
Oh, and apologies to those of you who (A) aren’t Dr. Strangegun or ExistingThing or Sebastian and (B) actually slogged through the technobabble above; I’m sure it meant nothing to you.
I tried that once, declared it to be decidedly “not scottish” and moved on.
Comment by Sebastian — February 22, 2008 @ 9:24 am
I made it to “profoundly broken” and then just skipped until I got to “Sebastian.” That made it simple enough.
Comment by Bitter — February 22, 2008 @ 10:35 am
Wow. Brings back memories of getting the funky video card working on my laptop for Fedora.
I’d be lying if I said I messed with it for days.
Never be too proud to go vesa. If only to regroup. I know it hurts.
Comment by existingthing — February 22, 2008 @ 2:47 pm
Is the beast not machine-level VGA compatible? You don’t *have* to go VESA… reminds me of the days back when i was trying to wrangle a Trident 8900 16M VGA card to work with SLS Linux 0.89 …
Comment by drstrangegun — February 23, 2008 @ 11:45 am
I know where my “On” switch is.
(The last time I even heard “VESA”, I was still writing autoexec.bat files on separate boot floppies for each different game I owned…)
Comment by Tam — February 24, 2008 @ 3:28 pm
Just finished a rebuild of my laptop with Ubuntu, which made absolutely zero complaints about my funky video card, odd network card, and slightly strange CD burner controller.
I felt like a mechanic ordering a used car through the mail. I kept looking under the hood to find some problem, but I couldn’t find a thing wrong.
It’s downright un-linux-like!
Comment by existingthing — February 26, 2008 @ 10:15 pm
Yeah, Ubuntu does an awesome job of automagically configuring all your hardware; I can’t recall ever hitting a snag with it.
Comment by TD — February 27, 2008 @ 9:23 pm
I once tried to compile Gentoo. I don’t remember if I ever finished.
Comment by Alcibiades McZombie — February 28, 2008 @ 1:28 am