Xvesa black magic

[William Tracy]

Hello all,

I'm playing with an Kdrive-based image of mine under Qemu. I built
Xvesa from the 7.3 release of Xorg, as 7.4 seems to have a regression
in TinyX (that's a topic for another email). I'm building the images
using the T2 SDE framework, if that's meaningful to anyone.

Everything compiles fine. I am able to launch Xvesa just fine ... but
I get no mouse input. It does not respond to a ctrl+alt+backspace
signal or a ctrl+alt+F<n> signal (which works before the server
starts).

Finally, I resorted to launching:
sleep 30; pkill X
in one console, while launching Xvesa from another console. This at
least allowed me to see the output from Xvesa, after the script killed
the server:

Couldn't find the keyboard driver keybd
Could not init font path element blablabla
Could not init font path element blablabla
X server does not support locale
cannot set locale modifiers
blackbox: managing screen 0 using TrueColor visual 0x21, depth 16
X connection to :0.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown).
xinit:  conection to X server lost.

waiting for X server to shut down

The X11 startup script I'm using is:
#!/bin/sh

. /etc/profile # PATH
HOME=/root # ???

# on x86* we usually could use Xvesa, otherwise we rather need Xfbdev
if [ -d /sys/class/graphics/fb0 ]; then
        X="Xfbdev"
else
        X="Xvesa -mode 0x117"
fi

cd $home
xinit `which blackbox` -- `which $X` -mouse mouse,/dev/input/mice
-keybd keyboard


I have confirmed that it is Xvesa, and not Xfbdev that is being
launched, and I have tried every conceivable variation on the server
parameters at this point.

Now, what really puzzles me: in spite of the error message, I can
force a response to keyboard input. If I launch an xterm and no window
manager, I can force the xterm to get key focus, and I can type into
it. However, nothing I can do will make the mouse respond to motion or
to clicks.

So, any thoughts on whether this looks like a kernel configuration
issue, a build configuration issue, or just a run-time X configuration
issue?

If anyone is *really* motivated to help :-) I can try to get you a
copy of the image I built and/or the configuration I used to build it.

-- 
William Tracy
afishionado at gmail.com -- wtracy at calpoly.edu
Vice President, Cal Poly Linux Users' Group
http://www.cplug.org

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your
right to say it."
    -- Evelyn Beatrice Hall, frequently mis-attributed to Voltaire