Toshiba Satellite 1805-S274

1.0 (stable) boots/installs/works correctly, but wireless support is sub-par and won't detect either of my Broadcom-based PCMCIA cards.

1.9 (dev) detects the wifi card and connection to the net is a breeze, except now I can only achieve 800x600 resolution. Linux support for the old Trident-based video cards is notoriously bad, but I've yet to come across another distro that supports the appropriate video mode in an older version and somehow manages to break it in a newer one. I should note that OpenGEU has the exact same issue, I suspect it has something to do with the default xorg settings for E17 vs. E16?

Reading some of the other forum entries, it looks like the card may not support 24 bit color. I'll try re-installing 1.9 when I have time and editing the xorg.conf accordingly, and report the results back here.

Last night (from the LiveCD) I opened up the xorg.conf in version 1.9 and changed the driver from "vesa" to "trident", then added 16 bit color mode at 1024x768. After restarting X, (ctrl-alt-backspace) the OS came up at the correct resolution. I saved the xorg.conf to a USB stick and did the same thing with the OpenGEU install I've been playing with, and got the same results.

So it seems like the 800x600 issue is pretty easy to fix, I'll post my elive.xorg.conf when all is said and done - someone should sticky it. I searched the forums here pretty extensively beforehand and didn't find a working solution, I ended up finding the fix in the ubuntu forums.

The xorg trident driver gives decent desktop performance, but I get these lines that bleed out from video playback in MPlayer. This is not specific to E16/E17, it happens with every distro I've tried thus far on this POS laptop. If anyone knows a fix, I will bow down to your nerdly superiority. And even with the leanest distro I have tried, and 1.1Ghz CPU and 32mb of video memory, flash videos run too slowly to watch. For now it looks like I can use this thing for surfing but if I want to watch bootleg episodes of Dragon Ball I'm going to have to dual-install XP.

Boo, Linux community. Boo to you for not having a better driver for my obscure, crappy video card. This of course does not reflect at all on this distro (ELive), which is fast becoming my favorite flavor. Also, OpenGEU is a system hog which completely negates the purpose of E17.

# I can't take credit for this, but it's robust as hell. I'm keeping a copy you should too.

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Monitor Model"
HorizSync 31.5 - 50
VertRefresh 50-110
EndSection

Section "Device"
### Available Driver options are:-
### Values: i: integer, f: float, bool: "True"/"False",
### string: "String", freq: "f Hz/kHz/MHz"
### [arg]: arg optional
#Option "SWcursor" # [bool]
#Option "PciRetry" # [bool]
#Option "NoAccel" # [bool]
#Option "SetMClk" # freq
#Option "MUXThreshold" # i
Option "ShadowFB" "no" # [bool]
#Option "Rotate" # [str]
#Option "VideoKey" # i
#Option "NoMMIO" # [bool]
#Option "NoPciBurst" # [bool]
#Option "MMIOonly" # [bool]
#Option "CyberShadow" # [bool]
#Option "CyberStretch" # [bool]
#Option "XvHsync" # i
#Option "XvVsync" # i
#Option "XvBskew" # i
#Option "XvRskew" # i
#Option "FpDelay" # i
#Option "Display1400" # [bool]
#Option "Display" # [str]
#Option "GammaBrightness" # [str]
#Option "TVChipset" # [str]
#Option "TVSignal" # i
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "trident"
#Driver "vesa"
VendorName "Trident Microsystems"
BoardName "Unknown Board"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 1
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 4
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 8
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 15
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
EndSection