Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Any way to get real text console without killing X capability?

[Walter Dnes]

On Thu, Feb 03, 2011 at 04:05:01PM -0800, walt wrote
> On 02/03/2011 02:11 PM, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
> > On 02/03/2011 08:07 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:
> >> Is there a way to have a real text console? I know that I can
> >> have 2 X sessions on tty10 and tty11 with different resolutions, and
> >> colour depths. Is there a way to set tty1..tty9 to 640x480 *IN TEXT
> >> MODE*, so that lat1-?? fonts would look normal, without killing the
> >> ability to have X run at 1920x1200?
> >
> > Note that the suggestion the others gave about disabling KMS is  probably
> >not what you need. Disabling KMS means that it will also be disabled for
> >X11, not only for the framebuffer. As you can imagine this is a bad thing.
>
> I'm aware of KMS because of my experiments with the 'nouveau' driver, but
> I still have no idea what KMS really does.
>
> In other words, I *cannot* imagine why disabling KMS is a bad thing, but I
> would very much like to know :)

  Walt, Alan, Enrico, Nikos see the thread "Not getting video hardware
acceleration" that I started on January 31.  Without KMS, and the
resulting DRI2 acceleration, my laptop could not run mplayer fast enough
to keep up with an HDTV feed.  With KMS, which is required by the bibary
blob in the new Radeon driver, it works fine.  The documentation at
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xorg-config.xml requires KMS for newer ATI
Radeon cards.

  In "make menuconfig", I do not have any drivers enabled under...
    Device Drivers  --->
      Graphics support  --->
      -*- Support for frame buffer devices  --->
but I still have /dev/fb0 show up.  Under...
      Console display driver support  --->
the line...
      -*- Framebuffer Console support
indicates that framebuffer console support is enabled, whether I like it
or not.  This is part and parcel of the ARI Radeon driver.  Without it,
no X.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>