"The Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

SiS 6326 and XFree86

From Victor Renteria on Mon, 19 Jul 1999

I have Red Hat 5.2 and Window 98 installed on a partitioned 6 Gig disk (each OS has 3 Gigs). After I boot and log onto Linux and type "startx" I get a blue screen with a thin vertical line from top to bottom. This vertical line moves from left to right only; no desktop, no icons, nothing but this line. I have an PC100 mainboard with an onboard SiS 6326 display adapter and a Sound Pro sound card. When I type Ctl+Alt+Backspace on the keyboard it takes me back to the shell without any error messages. What is the matter?

From what I read the generic VGA driver will not work. I can verify this because I have tried it. What in the world can I do? If available, where can I download a driver from and how do I install it. Remember I am new and don't know the commands to access the A: drive. I know a few basic commands, very few.

Any advise would be helpful thanks.

Well, first I look at the XFree86 web site to see which X server (driver) you should be running with that chipset. I'd look into:

XFree86 Video Card/Server List

http://www.xfree86.org/cardlist.html

... which tells me that you should be using the svga (Generic "super VGA") driver/server. (In XFree86 terminology an X "server" is a program that is compiled to drive a particular combination of video and input devices --- it "serves" all of the X clients, which are programs that share the screen and the input events).

Here's their section on the SiS sets:

SiS 3D PRO AGP  .........................................  XF86_SVGA
SiS 5597  ...............................................  XF86_SVGA
SiS 5598  ...............................................  XF86_SVGA
SiS 6326  ...............................................  XF86_SVGA
SiS SG86C201  ...........................................  XF86_SVGA
SiS SG86C205  ...........................................  XF86_SVGA
SiS SG86C215  ...........................................  XF86_SVGA
SiS SG86C225  ...........................................  XF86_SVGA

I also look at other resources on their site of see if there are any configuration samples or notes:

Information for SiS Users

http://www.xfree86.org/3.3.3.1/SiS.html

This isn't terribly informative. However it suggests to me that you might need to get the latest X distribution. The Red Hat 5.2 distribution is over a year old now. With the way that video chipsets change that's actually pretty ancient.

Unfortunately the Red Hat web site gets harder to navigate as they get bigger. Seems to be an endemic problem among corporate web sites. With a trip to their search engine (provided by Google! (http://www.google.com)) I find that your updates should be at:

http://updates.redhat.com/5.2/i386

... although I was unable to check that (I left my browser trying to connect for several minutes while typing other parts of this message. Their corporate pages came up quick enough, but it looks like their "updates" host is a bit overloaded (which seems odd since it's 3:00 am on a Sunday nite/Monday morning).

In any event, get the update from one of their mirror sites like Walnut Creek's CD-ROM archive site:

ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux/redhat/old-releases/redhat-5.2/updates/i386

Once you've fetched the RPM files you using a command like:

rpm -Uvh *.rpm

... in your download directory, maybe /usr/local/from/cdrom.com/ for example.

Then you want to run the XF86Setup program to let it try to configure your installation of XFree86.

Peruse the XFree86 web site for details. Also consider finding a local users group and seeing if they run any "installfests." The kind of hands-on, face-to-face help that a few Linux people can give at an install fest will beat out what I can tell you in a short e-mail every time.

You can search LG back issues for the canonical lists of users groups (I seem to have listed three of those back in issue #29 when ranting about Winmodems: http://www.starshine.org/mirrors/lgaz/issue29/tag_winmodem.html)

... checking those I see that the old LUGWWW in the Netherlands seems to have moved, but that it is now listed in the Linux Users Groups "Web Ring" at:

Linux User's Groups Webring

http://www.nlug.org/webring

... however, the other two lists of LUGs seem to still be valid.

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 44 August 1999

HTML transformation by Heather Stern of Starshine Techinical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

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