shadowfb doesn't work on Thinkpad 600E

[GJones]

I just set up a spare Thinkpad 600E with Salix LXDE. It works, but is ludicrously slow even for a 400 MHz machine. A bit of investigation revealed that the vesa driver does not have its shadow framebuffer enabled, which probably explains the problem.

So I create a xorg.conf and set ShadowFB on. To my surprise and annoyance, X would not start, claiming that it couldn't find any configurable screens.

I also tried the neomagic accelerated driver (at 16 bit color, so the acceleration actually works). It's (unsurprisingly) slower than vesa. I tried disabling its acceleration and enabling the shadow framebuffer... Bam, hard lock, had to use Alt+SysRq.

I would have tried the fbdev driver as well, but unfortunately Salix doesn't ship it.

Anyway... Any ideas re the shadow framebuffers not working?

[Shador]

Post your configuration.

[GJones]

Update: I never figured out how to get ShadowFB working, and X refuses to autogenerate a xorg.conf file. However, I discovered that X11's autodetection works fine with the NeoMagic driver, defaulting to 16-bit color. Set swappiness and VFS cache pressure to something low and it works about as well as Windows 2000 - a little slower, but a lot more secure and functional.

So in short, if you have one of these Thinkpads:
- DO NOT get bogged down messing with xorg.conf
- DO remember to install the evdev input driver if you're using a minimal system
- DO use a lightweight desktop (in my case pcmanfm + fluxbox works great)
- DO enable outline move and resize for your WM (this doesn't hurt on Windows either!)

Also, if you use Opera as your main browser, remember to disable its GTK/QT theming, which tends to bog it down. Disabling the glitchy tray icon also helps.