just a c source file and 2 header files

Hi. Sorry I didn't get back earlier. I kind of took the weekend off the Internet. Don't worry about those drivers you downloaded. You don't need them. The Permedia 2 chipset uses the glint driver that comes with XFree86 4.3.0 (the version in Slackware 9.0). In the part of your XF86Config file labeled Graphics Device Section find the line that says, "Device configured by xf86config:" Go to the third line below it and change it from

Driver "vga"

to

Driver "glint"

After you do this, you should be able to change the default color depth to 24 bit and actually have it work. If you still have issues with your monitor frequency, just post the model here and we'll try to help you out.

P.S. You may also be able to uncomment the Load "glx" line in the modules section to get better 3D support, but I don't have any experience with this card, so I'm not sure about this.

np on taking a few days :>

a rl friend of mine actually gave similiar advice.. except ive run into new problems lol.. i installed redhat7.3 on this machine to see if it detected the card. it did of course with perfect display. Ok so i goto reinstall slackware and the cd is no longer bootable? UGH slacks boot disk stuff isnt that great.. any ideas? yah i know its off topic but i am becoming frustrated after 4 attempts at making boot disks. thanks again.

ps; i do have a boot disk from the first time i installed slack 9.0

pps; basically whats the command that tells the boot disk to load the kernel on the install cd? : /

and also does anyone know why the cd used to boot and why it doesnt now. Does it make any difference redhat is installed now. I know it checks the cdrom in POST before it boots to the HD, so i cant explain why the cd used to boot but wont now :/

It shouldn't really make any difference that Red Hat is now installed. Slackware uses Syslinux (isolinux) to boot like a lot of newer distributions are doing. It is true that this doesn't work right with some BIOSes, but you booted from the disk before. If it booted before, it should boot now. To solve a problem like this you have to break it down logically, and eliminate possibilities. There are two possibilities here: (1) Something about the computer has changed. (2) Something about the disk has changed. So, if possible, try booting another computer from the disk. It may have gotten scratched (I've seen this many times). Also try booting the computer from another bootable CD and see if it is working right. My suspicion would be the disk being the problem. Sometimes you can buff out scratches on CDROMs, but you may have to burn another copy. I have a Slackware 9.0 CD that used to work correctly, but now won't install a certain package. I am fairly certain this is due to a scratch on the disk. A scratch in the wrong place would make a disk not boot at all.

P.S.: Before you rebuild your computer you may want to save a copy of the current XF86Config (it may be XF86Config-4 on Red Hat 7.3) at least for reference for when you set up X again in Slackware.

good idea. im going to back up that config file now.

I cleaned the CD over and over again.. Cleaned the drive. attempted to boot my laptop to it, didnt work. I cleaned the living sh** out of the cd and it doesnt appear to be scratched but who knows it could be to small to see. I suppose ill order another slack cd because burning linux cd's for me does not work, unless youve got advice on that to! hah. thanks alot for your help !!!

also took your advice to trying another bootable cd in that drive.. it didnt work either. so its something with the drive? bios? ive looked all thru bios and the drive seems to be working just fine. i dunno what to do to be honest. im not 'giving up on linux' i just dont understand why this always happens with nix and not windows.. weird.. well thx for ur help


ps: the system will install redhat with the aid of a boot diskette

If your computer won't boot from the CDROM, then you have two other choices for a Slackware installation. By the way, the things to look for in the BIOS settings are a Boot Order setting and a Boot Devices Security setting (or something like these). A lot of BIOSes don't have a Boot Devices security setting, so don't be surprised if you can't find it, but if it does have this setting, then both of these settings need to be correctly set to allow it to boot from the CDROM (and make sure you don't have a disk in the floppy drive). I can't imagine why this would have gotten changed in you BIOS however, unless your CMOS battery died, or you loaded the default settings for some other reason. If you just can't find any success this way, however, here are your other two choices.

The simplest choice might be to use the boot manager floppy that Patrick provides an image for with Slack 9. This is not included with the downloadable single CD install image, but it should be on the full disk set that comes in a Slackware box set. If you don't have the full set, then you can download it from any of the Slackware mirrors under the Slackware-9.0/rootdisks directory (you should find it in a directory named rootdisks on one of the Slackware CDs if you do have the set). The name of the file is sbootmgr.dsk. Write this file to a floppy with rawrite.exe under Windows, or with cat or dd under Linux.

rawrite sbootmgr.dsk a:

Windows or

cat sbootmgr.dsk > /dev/fd0

Linux. The dd command in Linux is

dd if=sbootmgr.dsk of=/dev/fd0

Then once you boot from this floppy, you should be able to use the boot manager it provides to boot from a CDROM drive.

The other choice is to make a Linux boot disk floppy and two root disk floppies for the installation program. The root disk floppy images are in the same place as the boot manager floppy image. They are named install.1 and install.2. You can write them to disks the same way as the sbootmgr.dsk image by just substituting each of their filenames in turn in the command line for rawrite or cat or dd. The boot disk image is in a directory parallel to the rootdisks directory named, unsurprisingly, bootdisks. The default boot image name is bare.i. You should use this unless you need to support some special hardware during installation (more information can be found in the README.TXT files in both the bootdisks and rootdisks directories). Just copy it to a floppy the same way as the other images. When you have all three floppies, you boot from the bare.i floppy and then insert first the install.1 and then the install.2 floppies when prompted for root disks. Please forgive me if I've forgotten some detail. It's been a long time since I had to do this.

ok i am now up and running slacware 9.0 with perfect gnome display. allow me to say thank you to all who helped on this thread. i learned ALOT. cant thank you guys enough!!!