[K12OSN] settings in lts.conf to support ATI Mach64 for X server

Sun Sep 25 23:42:36 UTC 2005

Funny you should ask this....

Actually, last month I had a thin client with an original ATI Mach64
video board, vintage 1996!  It is my friend's Pentium-120 that used to
run Windows NT 3.51.  I tried it out with a K12LTSP 4.2.1 server, and
yes indeed, those Mach64 cards are autodetected seamlessly.  But they're
a little slow by today's standards.  This isn't a problem if you're
doing OpenOffice.org, email, and Web surfing.  But when you fire up
TuxType, you'll see it.  

The successor to that chip, the ATI 3D Rage Pro (Xpert at Work, Xpert at Play,
Xpert98), uses the same X11 driver and is way quicker.  It's pretty easy
to find used 3D Rage Pro PCI boards on the cheap; another good
alternative is the S3 Trio64 or newer chipset.  I dropped a spare
Trio64V+ board in my friend's computer, and TuxType started running at
normal speed.  After network bandwidth, I've discovered that video
chipset oomph is the major performance factor on the thin client, not
the CPU.

Now, what I *did* run into with this old box is a mouse issue.  This old
box doesn't have a PS/2 mouse port; it uses serial mice.  The mouse was
physically on COM1.  Thus, I had to make an entry for this box's MAC
address in lts.conf so that it would always use /dev/ttyS0 for that guy
instead of /dev/psaux, like all my other thin clients do.  Once I did
that, the ol' P-120 dinosaur made a great LTSP client.

--TP

On Sun, 2005-09-25 at 16:44 -0500, Petre Scheie wrote:

> I have a potential thin client with an on-board ATI Mach64 chipset for 
> video.  It's an old 486, but has PCI slots, so the Universal Boot Floppy 
> is able to recognize the ethernet card.  But I can't figure out what X 
> server to set for it in lts.conf.  I've tried setting X = ati (for XFree 
> 4) and virtually all the XFree 3 drivers, but I mostly get "no screens 
> found" errors.  What driver (presumably XFree 3) do I need to install to 
> make this work?  What package do I need to have yum pull down?  BTW, 
> this is for k12ltsp ver 4.4.1.
> 
> Petre
> 
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