Installing on old Travelmate C100

[alenist]

Hi, I installed Buster on a very old Travelmate C100. Installation went smoothly and I get the familiar grub menu at start, but then, choosing Debian GNU/Linux leads to a black screen. If I try "Advanced options" and then "recovery mode" I can login as root but network is disabled and /etc/init.d/networking restart doesn't work. I get Connect: netwoirk is unreachable when I try to ping the router.

I guess the black screen is caused by X not recognizing the video card (Silicon Motion SM720 Lynx).

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks and happy new year to everybody

[p.H]

If you want to enable the network you can either boot in rescue mode and start NetworkManager :

Code: Select all

systemctl start NetworkManager

or boot in non-graphical mode by appending "2" to the linux command line in the GRUB menu editor.
Could you post the output of "lspci -nn" regarding the VGA controller ?

[alenist]

Thanks, appending 2 I can work in text mode with netwoek.
lspci gives 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Silicon Motion, Inc. SM720 Lynx 3DM [126f:0720] (rev C1)

[p.H]

There does not seem to be any kernel driver for this device, but you can try to install the xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion package.
If you selected Gnome+gdm3, you may have better luck choosing a less demanding desktop environment.

[alenist]

According to this page

https://manpages.debian.org/testing/xse ... .4.en.html

that driver should support my device. However, it is not recognized automatically, so I tried to create a xorg.conf file using this settings:

https://romanrm.net/loongson/siliconmotion

Unfortunately, the screen remains black
X terminates with a
Fatal Server Error:
(EE) Caught signal 11 (Segmentation fault)