X Window System

About the video card

The graphical card in this laptop is called a ``Tridend CyberBlade XP Ai1'' by the preinstalled Microsoft Windows. However, this probably is a very new revision of that board, because ``cat /proc/pci'', ``lspci -vv'', ``scanpci -v'', and ``X -configure'' all say the same thing: ``unknown VGA-capable card found''(be it in their words instead of mine), although the X server mentions support for a CyberBlade XP and a CyberBlade Ai1 (but admittedly not a CyberBlade XP Ai1).

According to the Toshiba technical specifications, the name of this card is 'CyberALLADIN-T'.

To make it work with XFree86

The trident standard module brought with XFree86 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 does not work with the video card. A workaround is to use the FBdev driver, but that one is dog slow; you can forget about full-screen multimedia thingies.

XFree86 4.2

Thanks to Jeff Chua jchua@fedex.com, a working driver can be found at http://www.xfree86.org/~alanh/trident_drv.o. This driver requires XFree86 4.2.0 and works perfectly. To make it work, copy this file after a normal install and configuration of XFree86 in order to replace the trident.o brought with XFree86 4.2

Note from Wouter Verhelst: while the latest Debian/unstable packages are still on 4.1.0. Shit. And they're so good. UPDATE: I can now confirm this. I installed X 4.2.0 in a chroot environment, which indeed gives me accelerated graphics. I can play games now! Woohoo! ;-). And since then prerelease deb's have become available. Simple visit http://raw.no/x4.2/ and find your nearest mirror.

About the keyboard

I also had the problem that my X server sometimes interpreted a keyboard event more than once. This was solved by adding a line like

Option ``XkbDisable'' ``true''

to /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. Wouter Verhelst wouter@debian.org (the original author of this document) found that this fucks up your keyboard mapping. To fix this you'll have to use xmodmap to fix it again. The easiest way to achieve that follows:

  • Dump your keyboard map to .xmodmaprc:
    xmodmap -pke > .xmodmaprc
    
  • Use your $EDITOR to edit the file so that the keyboard mapping is sane again. You'll see that no key has a third value. You need those third values for the extended keys; so you'll have to add them. The symbolic names of keys like @, and | are the same as those for XKB, so reading your XKB keymap may help. If your system is sane, you should be able to find those at /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/.
  • At the end of the file, add the following two lines:
    remove mod1 = Mode_switch
    add mod3 = Mode_switch
    
  • Map Mode_switch to some key. You probably want Alt Gr, which has keycode 113. If you insist, you can map it to Return, the Windows key, heck, or even your spacebar if you really want to. Use ``xev'' to find out what the keycode of your chosen key is.
  • Finally load your new keymap:
    xmodmap .xmodmaprc

The keyboard should work now. Many thanks go to Olaf Schnapauff olaf@schnapauff.com for showing me how great xmodmap actually is.

If you want to see a working XF86Config file, check out the lazy files section.