Arch Linux

WyRe

Member

Registered: 2018-03-03

Posts: 19

VIA Technologies graphic card won't start xorg server

Hi everyone,

We are having issues with this one exactly:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Tecnologies, Inc. KM400/KN400/P4M800 [S3 UniChrome] (rev 01)

We are not able to load i3 despite of we have added it to our `~/.xinitrc`

Here our /etc/X11/xorg.conf and our /var/log/Xorg.0.log when we try to start the xorg server with `xf86-video-openchrome` installed and the default cfg file generated with `X -configure`

We just have removed the following line

BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"

cause it was a suggestion from someone in #archlinux32 (freenode). But did not work neither.

I think apparently xf86-video-openchrome must be fine at upstream, cause the machine is able to load PuppyLinux in live mode, (though I don't know what openchrome driver version are they implementing). Anyway ... We were thinking about report a bug as the last resource.

Thank you all.

andreas_baumann

Administrator

From: Zurich, Switzerland

Registered: 2017-08-10

Posts: 833

Website

Re: VIA Technologies graphic card won't start xorg server

Puppylinux has an older Xorg presumably, before 1.20. That's why it still worked..
I have a Matrox, a MACH64 and some Gloria VESA, AMD integrated GPUs (Geode), none of them work..

WyRe

Member

Registered: 2018-03-03

Posts: 19

Re: VIA Technologies graphic card won't start xorg server

Puppylinux has an older Xorg presumably, before 1.20. That's why it still worked..
I have a Matrox, a MACH64 and some Gloria VESA, AMD integrated GPUs (Geode), none of them work..

Mmm, I see; anyway ... There are not suggestions? I mean, ... We would try the proprietary version if not were because it is not recommended in the Arch wiki.:

The proprietary VIA drivers are no longer available as they are considered unstable and insecure.

So ... maybe an older xorg server version? What do you think about xorg-server1.12 or xorg-server1.19-git?

First, we are trying disabling `vesafb` (another suggestion from #archlinux32 based on this one), I'll update with info when we have tested it.

Thank you all again.

eugen-b

Member

Registered: 2017-07-09

Posts: 56

Re: VIA Technologies graphic card won't start xorg server

It was always difficult to impossible (temporarily) to make my VIA VX800 machine work with Manjaro or Arch. On both of them the legacy graphics drivers are disable in the kernel config.
Which wroked more reliably for me antiX: https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic … post-22983

This is not the answer of the question how to make Arch32 work with a VIA machine, but my guess would be to build a custom kernel with legacy video enabled.

You should be able to fall back to xf86-video-vesa driver, install the package and use the kernel parameter xdriver=vesa.

Last edited by eugen-b (2019-06-18 22:16:23)