Date: Sat, 24 Oct 1998 16:10:17 +0100 From: Brian Somers <brian@Awfulhak.org> To: John-David Childs <jdc@nterprise.net> Cc: freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: CTX Laptop/Neomagic chipset Message-ID: <199810241510.QAA00437@woof.lan.awfulhak.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 23 Oct 1998 15:29:09 MDT." <19981023152909.13159@denver.net>
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> While searching through the archives trying to figure out why my CTX
> 200MhzPentium-MMX laptop was hanging during the "probing devices" stage
> (I still haven't figured that one out...I've tried both the 2.2.7-PAO
> boot floppy and 3.0-RELEASE with the same results) I came across a
> thread from August in this group about "flickering" LCD displays if the
> laptop uses a Neomagic chipset when the laptop gets warm. The
> assertion was made that there must be something wrong in the X Server
> initialization because the flicker doesn't happen in Windoze...
That was me :-)
I never actually ran windows on this machine (I'm typing this mail on
it), but as it came pre-installed with Windows95, I assumed (I know)
that it worked ok....
> While I can't attest to any bug in X (and didn't follow the thread any
> further) I can without reservation state that the flickering *DOES*
> happen under Windows NT when it's been on for awhile. I've been
> running NT Server 4.0 for about 6 months (cuz FreeBSD didn't support my
> LinkSys EtherFast 10/100 PCMCIA card until (at least 2.2.7-PAO) now).
Can you try two other things - just out of curiosity ?
If you lift the keyboard (there are two slide-inwards-clips just
above the keyboard) and remove the heat-sink (there are 3 screws),
you should see that on the underside of the heatsink there are two
pads - one goes over the CPU and one goes over the memory modules.
The Neomagic chip is up at the top right of where the heat-sink was.
Is there any pad over that (there isn't on mine) ?
Also, does switching the display off & on remove the flickering ?
There's a BIOS setting to choose between suspending or switching the
screen off when the lid is closed. If you make sure it's just going
to switch the screen off, and try this when the display is
flickering, does it become clear again ?
A few other things I've tried... If you get the machine *really* hot
(this seems easiest to do by playing chess via xboard), it gets to
the point where even switching the display off & on doesn't help,
although if you restart X, you end up with a display that's
flickering so much and is so badly smeared that you can't read
anything.
Also, the whole deal has gotten a lot worse since I upgraded the
memory. I've got two 32Mb DIMMs in there now (+ 8Mb internal) and
I'm sure things weren't as bad with the default 24Mb (8x2 + 8).
> Please CC any replies to me as I'm not (yet) on this list :)
If you want a copy of my kernel config for 3.0, drop me a line.
> --
> John-David Childs (JC612) Enterprise Internet Solutions
> Systems Administration @denver.net/internet-coach/@ronan.net
> & Network Engineering 8707 E. Florida Ave #814 Denver, CO 80231
> If you're right 90% of the time, why quibble about the remaining 3%?
--
Brian <brian@Awfulhak.org>, <brian@FreeBSD.org>, <brian@OpenBSD.org>
<http://www.Awfulhak.org>;
Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour....
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