[Xorg] Please help Xorg newbie

[Timothy Murphy]

I'm looking for some low-level help with Xorg,
and don't know where to turn.
(It is clear that this mailing list is far too elevated for my problem!)

The problem: I'm running Fedora-2 on a Sony Picturebook (C1VFK) laptop,
and I cannot get X to run at 16bpp, as it did under Redhat-9.

I've looked at the FAQ <http://freedesktop.org/XOrg/FAQ>
and followed the advice there without getting very far.
Basically, if I set the DefaultDepth to 16bpp (or 15bpp)
when X starts there is a large black oval on the screen
which gradually disappears, leaving a white screen with nothing on it.
However, there is no X error reported in Xorg.0.log, or elsewhere.

I'd be happy to try my hand at compiling the ATI driver
but I'm not really sure where to start,
and am looking, as I said, for some low-level tutorial on Xorg.

For example, I wondered if it was possible to abstract the commands
sent to the video card, in which case it might be possible
to see how the commands differed from those sent by XFree86 under RH-9.

I should say that I filed a bugzilla (#718) about this problem 
a couple of months ago,
but haven't heard anything from that.

Also, there has been some discussion of this issue
on the Picturebook mailing lists
<c1-forum at frijoles.hungry.com> and <vaio-pcg-c1-general at lists.sourceforge.net>
and it seems no-one has solved this problem.

I've asked about this problem on this list a couple of times,
without getting any response,
so I would be very grateful for any advice you can give me.







-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland