The X Window System

The graphical card in this laptop is called a ``Tridend CyberBlade XP Ai1'' by the preinstalled Microsoft Windows. However, this probably is a very new revision of that board, because ``cat /proc/pci'', ``lspci -vv'', ``scanpci -v'', and ``X -configure'' all say the same thing: ``unknown VGA-capable card found''(be it in their words instead of mine), although the X server mentions support for a CyberBlade XP and a CyberBlade Ai1 (but admittedly not a CyberBlade XP Ai1).

According to the Toshiba technical specifications², the name of this card is 'CyberALLADIN-T'.

It might be possible to get the trident module to support this card; however, I did not get that to work. A workaround is to use the FBdev driver, but that one is dog slow; you can forget about full-screen multimedia thingies³.

According to Jeff Chua mailto:jchua@fedex.com, a working driver can be found at http://www.xfree86.org/~alanh/trident_drv.o. Which requires X 4.2.0, while the latest Debian/unstable packages are still on 4.1.0. Shit. And they're so good. UPDATE: I can now confirm this. I installed X 4.2.0 in a chroot environment, which indeed gives me accelerated graphics. I can play games now! Woohoo! ;-)

I also had the problem that my X server sometimes interpreted a keyboard event more than once. This was solved by adding a line like

Option ``XkbDisable'' ``true''

to /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. Since that fucks up your keyboard mapping, you'll have to use xmodmap to fix it again. The easiest way to achieve that follows:

• Dump your keyboard map to .xmodmaprc:

  xmodmap -pke > .xmodmaprc
  

• Use your $EDITOR to edit the file so that the keyboard mapping is sane again. You'll see that no key has a third value. You need those third values for the extended keys; so you'll have to add them. The symbolic names of keys like @, and | are the same as those for XKB, so reading your XKB keymap may help. If your system is sane⁴, you should be able to find those at /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/.
• At the end of the file, add the following two lines:

  remove mod1 = Mode_switch
  add mod3 = Mode_switch
  

• Map Mode_switch to some key. You probably want Alt Gr, which has keycode 113. If you insist, you can map it to Return, the Windows key, heck, or even your spacebar if you really want to. Use ``xev'' to find out what the keycode of your chosen key is.
• Finally load your new keymap:

  xmodmap .xmodmaprc
  

The keyboard should work now.

Many thanks go to Olaf Schnapauffmailto:olaf@schnapauff.com for showing me how great xmodmap actually is⁵.