The soul of a new machine.

[zotz]

Well, the new (partly, but all new to me) machine's up and running, and very fast it feels too. There's still a very annoying screen glitch, but I should be able to get that hammered down fairly soon. The important thing is . . .


Mozilla is loooovveeellyyyy. And it's not even the most recent version. This is nice.

Update: Glitch sorted. Just a matter of actually telling X how much memory the graphics card has to play with. This is all settling down nicely.

Comments

[blufive.livejournal.com]

Welcome to the Lizard side :)

Should you wish to get more up-to-date, Mozilla 1.3 Beta is imminent and, to judge by the recent nightlies, shouldn't have too many beta-tendencies. Bayesian spam filtering rules!

If you're not that brave, 1.3 final should be along shortly (a few weeks, tops).

[zotz]

I've been avoiding doing anything with the machine for the last few months, until I got the new hardware all sorted. At which point, Debian 3 comes with Mozilla included. I may jump to a newer one shortly . . . we'll see.

[fluffymark]

I've got a screen glitch that won't go away, and I suspect it's something to do with my graphics card not quite agreeing with X. I haven't figured out how to fix it - it sounds liek you know something about this so maybe you can help me?

X was working fine in 256 colours, except it was only 256 colours, and I was struggling with that few (very badly rendered ghostscript, for example). Unsure how to change the colour depth, I finally achieved the change to 16 bit colour only by commenting out all teh 256 colour modes in one of the X config files - surely there must be a better way? Anyhow, I now have 16 bit colour *but* with glitches. And I want the glitches to go. Problem is, I'm not sure how much memory my graphics card actually has, its some S3/Virge card thats several years old. Is there any way of finding out?

Sorry for all these questions - I've been meaning to ask someone all week, but seeing your post suddenly reminded me!

[zotz]

Two things spring to mind. One is to make sure that your /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers has as its entry smething like

:0 local /usr/X11R6/bin/X vt7 -bpp 24 -dpi 100 -nolisten tcp

The -bpp refers to the default colour depth, and I know that not all setup scripts manage to include it. The other is to make sure that a default colour depth is set in your config file - /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 on my box, but yours may differ. Something like:

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "Rage128"
Monitor "Eizo T562-T"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 1
Modes "1280x1024" "800x600"

[etc]

I don't really know a great deal about this, but that's what it's been for me in the past, so they're probably worth trying. What are you running it under, btw?

[zotz]

Sorry. I stopped before the interesting bit, didn't I?

There are sites online that list cards by manufacturers' serial numbers, FCC IDs, and the like. If you throw any visible numbers on it into google, you might come up with something useful. Failing which, they'll probably have cards listed with all the likely values, so if all else fails you could do it by elimination - for any given chip there are probably only two or three common amounts of memory, so it probably wouldn't take too long.

[fluffymark]

Thankyou! Maybe that'll help. I'll try things when I have time, which is unlikely to happen this week. I'm running X from a Linux PC. Only I'm not right now, so I can't check how it's configured. Not sure I've tried the Xservers file. Maybe that'll do something. The XF86Config file made errors occur when i tried including a DefaultDepth setting to it (the first thing I tried). After failing to get it to work that way, that's when I commented out all the unwanted modes, and then it got me 16 bit colour. But i'm not sure i should have done it that way. The glitches don't occur some of the time, but when they do, it's messy. I think it's about time I got a new graphics card. Actually, come to think of it, it's about time i replaced my whole computer, but that requires money, doesn't it?

Anyway, thanks for your help. :)