Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

howard · Posted: Mon 01 Aug 2005, 18:26 Post subject: Grainy desktop on IBM Thinkpad...

I need to ask this question again for two reasons:
1. The singular response I received to my previous append was not informative beyond what I already knew, and
2. I refuse to give up on Puppy.

I inherited an IBM Thinkpad laptop iSeries 1400 [Machine Type 2611-411], with a 4gig hard drive and 160MB of SODIMM memory. I have run Puppy successfully on many desktop machines and thought it would be perfect for this vintage 1998 laptop.

It booted up fine from the CD, and I answered the three questions regarding language, mouse type, scroll wheel. However, when the GUI desktop appeared, it was all mottled and grainy. The Video Wizard window was up but God-awful difficult to read. Nevertheless I clicked on each of the resolution option buttons along the bottom of the window but none corrected the problem.

Any suggestions? Does this laptop need some kind of funky unusual video driver? Is the amount of memory perhaps deficient? I have a 128MB SODIMM on order to bump the memory to the maximum of 256MB.

Thanks.
Howard

Bancobusto · Joined: 13 Jun 2005 Posts: 168 Location: Vancouver Island

Perhaps the Framebuffer modules would help you?

Search the forum for "Framebuffer" - I seem to recall a couple of people having success with it.

Good luck, hope that helps a bit Smile

Edit; You should have more than enough memory - I only have 128MB

danleff · Joined: 08 May 2005 Posts: 294 Location: Albany, NY

This laptop has a NeoMagic video chipset that is not vesa compliant. By all means, use a Puppy version with the frame buffer package built in. This should help a lot. I remember that one of the development guys made such a Puppy package, but I can't remember who.

You could also build Puppy on another system and add the packages, then remaster a cd that should also work. I will have to look around and see if the wiki has more information on this.

Take a look at this post.