X on the IBM PC110

Getting X working with RedHat 4.1 was frustrating. Although the graphical set-up script immediately put up something which looked very much like a working X server, it used some extra magic to get things working that it failed to record in the XF86Config file it produced.

This enabled me to run the 16-colour SVGA server if I specified X -bestRefresh in my .xserverrc file, but any attempt to run 8-bit mode resulted in shimmering failure.

Even with a known-good XF86Config file from Vaughan Pratt, I still couldn't get anything to work until I reverted to version 3.1.2 of the XF86_SVGA server. Then everything worked perfectly! The red pointing-stick thing behaves like a standard PS/2 mouse, which gpm is perfectly happy to drive. My /etc/sysconfig/mouse says:

MOUSETYPE="PS/2 -R"
XEMU3=yes

I have constructed a new keyboard map file for the Linux console. If you turn off the X keyboard extensions (by putting XkbDisable in the "Keyboard" section of XF86Config), then these mappings work perfectly under X too.

If for some reason you want to modify the standard X modmap, I have also designed the necessary template files for xkeycaps. However, xkeycaps crashes when I try to modify the Japanese key to the left of Alt, and even if I do the xmodmap by hand the X server refuses to recognise some of my new keycodes. I now don't bother with this and just use XkbDisable to adopt the console mappings.