[Rule-list] TinyX and RULE

[Michael Fratoni]

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I finally got a few hours of time, and a spare laptop to play with, so I 
decided to tackle the Xserver issue.

The laptop:
Older Toshiba Satellite Pro 420CDS (P100, 40M ram)
I did an install of Red Hat 8.0. It was painfully slow installing the 
packages, but otherwise no great difficulty in text mode. Never having 
owned or used a laptop, it took a little time to get the PCMCIA network 
card up and running, but it now works as well.

However, starting X was painful. Once either KDE or Gnome were up, they 
were, for the most part, useless.

I decided to have a go with building the kdrive (tinyX) servers in the 
official XFree86 source. After spending some time Googling, configuring 
and compiling, I now have the kdrive Xfbdev driver working, running in 
1024x768 mode. The window manager at present is "fluxbox", a derivative 
of "blackbox". The system is quite useable, and fairly responsive. 
Mozilla took just over a minute to start and load cnn.com. Fluxbox has 
some kde and gnome integration working, however, starting a konsole took 
some time, and ate up system resources quickly. Starting an xterm was 
quick, and seems to work quite well. I tried the Xvesa driver as well, 
without much success. It started, but colors were horrible, and I managed 
at one point to lock the machine.

The trick now is to build it all again, and install via slinky from 
scratch. I had already installed the stock XFree86 packages, as well as 
Gnome and KDE. Installing the new server was simply a matter of copying 
the binaries to the laptop and creating a link via 
ln -s  /usr/X11R6/bin/Xfbdev /usr/X11R6/bin/X
and modifying the stock scripts to load fluxbox as the WM.

Here is some system info:

[root at conundrum root]# fbset -s

mode "1024x768-76"
    # D: 78.653 MHz, H: 59.949 kHz, V: 75.694 Hz
    geometry 1024 768 1024 768 16
    timings 12714 128 32 16 4 128 4
    rgba 5/11,6/5,5/0,0/0
endmode

[root at conundrum bin]# uptime
  9:21pm  up 40 min,  3 users,  load average: 0.31, 0.15, 0.12

[root at conundrum bin]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         37740      37064        676          0        508      17840
- -/+ buffers/cache:      18716      19024
Swap:       193528       8236     185292

Partial "top" output:
  792 mfratoni  15   0 22756  22M 12384 S    15.3 59.8   1:19 mozilla-bin
  720 root      15   0  7192 3600  1148 S    10.0  9.5   0:27 X

Yes, X is running as root. The kdrive servers must be suid root to work, 
which is _not_ a good thing. I suspect it may be possible to use the old 
wrapper that X used for this purpose, but I haven't investigated it yet.

- -- 
- -Michael

pgp key:  http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/gpgkey.txt
Red Hat Linux 7.{2,3}|8.0 in 8M of RAM: http://www.rule-project.org/
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