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Updating and configuring the siliconmotion driver in Debian
The vesion of this driver which is currently in the standard Debian repository has a problem, which in most cases causes X.org to fail with a “Segmentation Fault” error right after start-up. A patch fixing it is already available, but is not yet applied and the rebuilt package is not uploaded to the archive yet. For more details on this issue, see:
If you want to get X.org to work without waiting for that fix, follow these steps:
1. Install X.org and the driver from anheng.com.cn
First of all, add the anheng.com.cn repository to your X.org and run apt-get update
.
After that:
apt-get install xserver-common xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
These packages (and possibly some more) will be upgraded from the newly-added repository at this point.
2. Modify (or create) xorg.conf
Set your X.org config to the following:1)
- /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section "Device" Identifier "Card0" Driver "siliconmotion" Option "HWCursor" "true" Option "VideoKey" "45000" Option "UseBIOS" "false" Option "PanelSize" "1024x600" Option "AccelMethod" "XAA" # or "EXA" EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Card0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultDepth 16 # or 24 SubSection "Display" Virtual 1024 600 Depth 16 EndSubSection SubSection "Display" Virtual 1024 600 Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection
After you restart your Desktop Manager (e.g. /etc/init.d/gdm restart
or /etc/init.d/slim restart
), X.org should start up successfully, using the new siliconmotion
driver.
Regarding performance, in my experience 16-bit color mode is faster than 24-bit, and XAA is faster than EXA.