[Rule-list] TinyX and RULE
Michael Fratoni
mfratoni at tuxfan.homeip.net
Mon Nov 18 04:44:04 EET 2002
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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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