[linrad] svgalib

[Patrick <f1ebk@xxxxxxx>]

First of all, I would like to say "thank you" to all of you who took the
time to gave me informations to solve my problem. And I really need it
because I haven't found (yet) what is going wrong...

I shall try to describe more precisely the situation here, so maybe
someone will have the solution : 

- I installed the 32 bits version of the Fedora because many programs do
not run on the 64 bits version. This means that I use the same CD-Rom as
most of you (despite the fact that my system has a 64 bits processor).
- I installed the default packages except that I added most of the
development tools (X,Gnome,KDE, etc...) but I do not think that the
problem is there.
- My system is fully updated so I can run even the video conference.
This means that all the packages are the latest ones and the kernel is
2.6.10.760_FC3. Kernel hasn't change since I started to compile svgalib.
- I have recompiled the kernel for other purposes, but never used any
during linrad installation.

Now about svgalib : 

- svgalib gives dozen of warnings during compilation, but I haven't seen
any error. I typed "make svgalib" from the linrad folder so problem is
not there.

- I am rather anxious about my video board. It's one of these 3D ones
with thousands of unnecessary stuff for svgalib. I still wonder if this
board is compatible with svgalib. For information the 'lspci' gives :

  VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34GL [Quadro FX
500/600 PCI] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
        Subsystem: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 01ba
        Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 5
        Memory at e8000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
        Memory at e0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
        Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
        Capabilities: [44] AGP version 3.0

- The only action I had on the Makefile.conf was to comment all the
drivers lines except the INCLUDE_CHIP_DRIVER and the INCLUDE_NV3_DRIVER.

In the detection section, I left only the INCLUDE_NV3_DRIVER_TEST

I did not touch the DAC section nor the DAC autodetect section (this may
be my mistake !). I still do not understand very well the goal of this
modification as the original Makefile.conf would produce an "All Board
library" that could fit any... (I certainly have misunderstood something
there).


Now let's see what appears to me as the hart of the problem : the
svgalib_helper :

- the make (in the svgalib) produces a file :
 /lib/modules/2.6.10-1.760_FC3/kernel/misc/svgalib_helper.o NOT .ko !

This doesn't hurt me as I am used to insmod ".o" files since my first
ax25 experiment under Linux ;)

In his site, DF9CY builds a small script with this "insmod
svgalib_helper.o" just before starting linrad. So I tried this command
without any script and the result is : 
insmod: error inserting 'svgalib_helper.o': -1 Invalid module format

Damned, this is not my day ! So I tried what Robert McGwier told me:

1) I have no /usr/src/linux folder ... So I hope that my kernel
compilations do not interfere now ... 
2) I did copy svgalib_helper.ko
to /lib/modules/2.6.10-1.760_FC3/kernel/misc/ so I have 2 files now
the .o and the .ko

depmod -a do not give any message , the prompt comes back after a while.
The "modprobe svgalib_helper" gives :
FATAL: Module svgalib_helper not found.

Sorry Bob, this is not my day... 

Conclusions :

If I am not using a too sophisticated video board for the svgalib, the
problem lies in the svgalib_helper.
Keep in mind that I DID recompile the kernel but I am not using it for
linrad. So I do not find any /usr/src/linux directory but I may have a
link to the latest recompiled kernel. A solution could be to compile
svgalib from this kernel (I'll try this ASAP).

Anyway thank you all for your help.

Very 73

Patrick de F1EBK






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