Useful HOWTOs

This is just a collection of notes I have created about how to get tricky various things running, generally because the instructions are not available elsewhere, or there are only collections of conflicting or incorrect instructions.

Dell Latitude C600/C500 series direct rendering (3D hardware acceleration):

You must use a 16-bit colour depth in xorg.conf (DefaultDepth 16) for this to work, 24-bit doesn't allow direct rendering on this graphics card.

Toshiba Libretto 100CT:

To use the native 800x480 resolution of the laptop's LCD, you must use the following Modeline in xorg.conf:

Modeline "800x480" 29.59 800 832 944 976 480 490 495 505

Graphics driver:

The neomagic driver renders the screen in a more ugly fashion than the vesa driver, but neither of them seem to allow me to run video from mplayer/vlc etc.

udev no space left on device booting error:

Due to the small amount of memory, default settings won't work when booting up (for at least the kernel I used, 2.6.16).

To get around this, edit /etc/conf.d/rc and change RC_DEVICE_TARBALL="no" to RC_DEVICE_TARBALL="yes".