[Xorg] Prtoblem with X on Sony Picturebook

[Timothy Murphy]

I've been trying for some weeks to get X running properly on my Sony laptop,
under Fedora-2 (and so Xorg).

Under Fedora-1, as under all versions of RedHat previously,
X ran perfectly at 1024x480x16bpp,
but the best I have been able to do with Xorg is 1024x480x8bpp
or 800x375x16bpp.

I reported this as an xorg bugzilla about 6 weeks ago
<http://freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=718>.
Here is the bugzilla report:
====================================================
Opened: 2004-06-03 20:44

Sony C1VFK Picturebook (notebook) under Fedora-2
Video board: ATI Rage Mobility P/M (Mach 128)
This ran at 1024x480 with 16bpp under Fedora-1 (XFree86)
but it does not appear possible to attain this now.
It runs OK at 1024x480 with 8bpp;
but when run with 16bpp one gets a large black oval
which shrinks to leave a blank white or cream screen.
There seem to be no errors reported in Xorg.0.log .

Several people have reported this failure,
and no-one seems to have found a solution.
====================================================

I've seen no evidence that this has been looked at by anyone,
and I don't have great hope it will be looked at in the near future.
So rather reluctantly I am seeing if I can make sense of it myself.
I say reluctantly because I know very little - effectively nothing - about X.

I have a number of preliminary questions,
which I would be most grateful to get a response to:

(1) Is this a sensible place to send queries of this kind?
Is there anywhere else where one might get help with such a query?

(2) There are several things about /etc/log/Xorg.0.log
which I don't understand.
Again, is there any document that would explain how to interpret
this log file?

For example, there are many entries like

	(II) ATI(0): Not using default mode "400x300" (exceeds panel dimensions)

I don't understand how 400x300 can "exceed panel dimensions".
particularly as it later seems to accept

	(**) ATI(0):  Default mode "640x480": 36.0 MHz, 43.3 kHz, 85.0 Hz

(3) More importantly, probably, where does it get the Default modes it lists?
Are they built into the driver?
I expected to find them somewhere in /usr/X11R8/lib/doc .

(4) How can I tell from this log file what the bpp setting is?

Well, I guess that is enough questions to start with,
though I have several more.

I might mention that I tried using the "ati" driver from FC-1,
but this failed with many undefined variables.
I guess there have been library changes since that version of XFree86.

Any and all suggestions or advice gratefully received.









-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland