It seems some recent Dell machines have the amount of video memory available set to 1MB by default. The desktop machines allow you to set this in the BIOS, but the laptops don't seem to allow you to adjust this. Christian Zietz has a hack for Linux that convinces the BIOS to let you use more memory, and I've just ported his hack to FreeBSD. Christian's code is at: http://www.chzsoft.com.ar/855patch.html and my patch to his code, and a binary compiled for 4.9 are at: http://www.cnri.dit.ie/~dwmalone/855patch/ You can just run "855patch 8192" before starting X, and suddenly you can do a resolution higher than 640x480 in 8 bit mode ;-) David.
On Wednesday 08 October 2003 10:10 am, David Malone wrote:> > You can just run "855patch 8192" before starting X, and suddenly > you can do a resolution higher than 640x480 in 8 bit mode ;-)Kewl. What do we have to do to convince you to make a port of it? ;^) -- Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket? Wes Peters wes@softweyr.com
On Wed, 2003-10-08 at 10:10, David Malone wrote:> It seems some recent Dell machines have the amount of video memory > available set to 1MB by default. The desktop machines allow you to > set this in the BIOS, but the laptops don't seem to allow you to > adjust this. Christian Zietz has a hack for Linux that convinces > the BIOS to let you use more memory, and I've just ported his hack > to FreeBSD. > > Christian's code is at: > > http://www.chzsoft.com.ar/855patch.html > > and my patch to his code, and a binary compiled for 4.9 are at: > > http://www.cnri.dit.ie/~dwmalone/855patch/ > > You can just run "855patch 8192" before starting X, and suddenly > you can do a resolution higher than 640x480 in 8 bit mode ;-)I'm pretty sure code got included in XFree86 a week or so ago to accomplish this. I'll be updating XFree86-4-Server-snap when I can so people can try this out. -- Eric Anholt eta@lclark.edu http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/ anholt@FreeBSD.org