[ltp] Linux but not Thinkpad newbie with q's.

[Vicky Lamburn]

Hiya,

I am writing this email at last from Mozilla Thunderbird on Xandros 
2.0.  I finally ditched XP to replace my ThinkPad T23 with Linux; of 
which I am a lot more pleased with (as I expected) and it has overall 
gone very well compared to my abortive attempts with NetBSD on the Amiga 
some time around the mid-late 90s...

I have pretty much sussed most things out, such as getting DVDs to play 
(easy peasy), installing software (notably Firefox and Thunderbird which 
I am used to), setting up APM instead of ACPI etc.; I'm not a newbie to 
ThinkPads or computing; just Linux!

My query relates to DVDs and S-Video output via the S3 
SuperSavage/IXC16's TV output.  I found S3Switch easy enough and issued 
a s3switch tv command in the console (bash) and sure enough my telly 
showed the screen (best in 640x480 and 800x600 unsurprisingly).  I can 
live with no having the LCD on at the same time; however something 
disconcerting has come to mind.

I have tried this with Ogle-MMX w/GUI and Xine with libdvdcss installed 
and all the rest of it (dependencies met basically) and whenever 
outputting the video on TV, the output is badly scrambled, and a big 
blue border on 640x480 and smaller on 800x600 - it almost looks like an 
overlay image not centered properly (this happens in window and full 
screen (ctrl+f in ogle) modes). 

I am using Xandros' default S3 Savage driver, no changes made yet.  Also 
the output seems to be NTSC which is annoying since I am in the UK and 
need PAL and it seems S3Switch does not support PAL output on Savage 
chips other than Savage3D chips.

I have searched high and low via google, to no avail :(  I have tried 
pressing Fn+F7/F8 to see if it helps, not at all.  The scrambled look 
sometimes occurs on the LCD but no often.  I read there was an issue 
with X11 refreshing?

I have tried it in 16/24bit colour depths on VGA/SVGA and XGA resolutions.

My t23 is 1GB RAM, 40GB HD, 1.13GHz PIII-m, DVD-ROM and all the usual 
(XGA display, soon to be SXGA+ if I get my way ;)).

Any experience would be appreciated as I don't want to have to have a 
NTFS partition for WinXP just for PowerDVD (though I do like PowerDVD 
all told).

Is this a video driver issue?

Many thanks,
Ms. Victoria Lamburn
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