[RndTbl] Linux distro for Pentium III

[Adam Thompson]

On 13-10-07 10:08 PM, Hartmut W Sager wrote:
> VESA??? I think VESA is from the 80386/80486 era, and that even 
> Pentium 1 (desktop) computers started adopting the PCI bus for several 
> reasons, including the replacement of the short-sighted VESA bus.  So, 
> a Pentium 3 should heavily post-date VESA. Roundtable mailing list 
> Roundtable at muug.mb.ca http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable
Yes and no.

You're thinking of the VESA LocalBus slot, which was short-sighted only 
in the sense that it was designed by a bunch of video card mfgrs to make 
their products look good - it did exactly what it was supposed to, and 
it was cheap enough that m/b mfgrs (mostly) just implemented it without 
putting up a fight.

However, VESA, the association, continues to define standards for 
video-related things today.  Some of the most important bits are the 
spacing of the mounting holes on the back of LCDs (yes, seriously), and 
a common definition of how to set video cards into a certain resolution 
with a linear, non-accelerated, frame buffer mapped to a certain address 
space... this latter piece is what the X "VESA" driver supports, a 
lowest-common-denominator mode so that you can at least set the 
resolution correctly on pretty much any video card today.

-Adam
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.muug.mb.ca/pipermail/roundtable/attachments/20131008/94cbc3d5/attachment.html>