First try at open source, but missing a driver I think

[Refugee]

Hi to everyone here. I took my first step toward open source tonight by trying to run Knoppix on an old 486 (with Win 95), not that i intend using it on that machine, I just wanted to see how it looked and worked. AFter figuring out how to make a boot floppy (no CD-ROM boot option in the BIOS--it's that old), things were going fine until the following:

Starting X11...root@tty1[/]#..
Retrying with Server XFree86 (vesa)
Error: No suitable X-server found for your card.
Retrying with Server XFree 86 (fbdev)._

That's where it stopped. I don't know anything yet about open source commands but I assume that a driver or some such thing wasn't available on the CD for a particula component. Is that the case, and if so, is it possible to get drivers for hardware that aren't included on the CD?

[dave_sussex]

I dont know what video card you have, but you might try when the boot screen comes up typing in

knoppix screen=640x480

in case your board doesnt support superVGA. I dont know the use of other ouput related parms for knoppix. hopefully someone else will let you know.

[tommydl]

It seems that X does not support whatever graphics card is in your box.
Take a look at http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/Status.html to see if it's supported.

It's probably not a good idea to try and run Knoppix on a 486 system anyway. It will run horribly slow.

[arkaine23]

I have a card that does this- a matrox pci card mystique 2 I think.

It works if I boot at low resolution usinga cheatcode-
knoppix screen=800x600

or in text mode with-
knoppix 2

[Refugee]

As you've suggested, it's a very old graphics card that isn't supported. I'm getting another computer within the week which I'll be trying Knoppix and a few other distros on, so I'm not going to pursue the 486 anymore. I was just anxious to see how Knoppix looked and worked, and being new to open source, I didn't know what was happening when it stopped.

Thanks for the replies. I'm sure I'll have more questions in the near future. And thanks for the very useful link, tommydl, I saved it for future reference.

:D

Edit: By the way, the card is Trident Super VGA if than means anything (I don't know the model and not willing to go into the box to find out since I'm getting another comp soon).