[Wylug-help] Linux on VIA EPIA Mini ITX

[Dave Roberts]

I've bought myself a new toy - VIA EPIA MS mini-ITX board, with 1000MHz 
fanless C3 Eden processor. I was intending running it with SuSE Linux 
9.1 but have had problems with the screen resolution. However, I have 
tried a couple of other distributions with the same effect. I presume it 
is the lack of driver support for the graphics card which is an 
integrated VIA unichrome AGP CLE266. However, there are a few odities 
with it as I will explain.

Basically I can't get a screen resolution better than 640x480 even 
though the graphics card and monitor configs both claim to be running at 
1024x768. My monitor isn't supported but is setup as a VESA generic and 
I don't think that is the problem. The CLE266 isn't supported which I 
assume is the problem (another VIA card is loaded automatically instead 
- the CLE 3122). I have tried to install the CLE266 driver on the disk 
which came with the board and also downloaded the latest driver and 
information from the VIA Arena site. Having followed all the 
instructions I still can't get the new driver to work.

However, the plot thickens - I decided to check out the configuration 
with a Knoppix live distribution and it successfully found the CLE 266 
card and configured the screen resolution to 1024x768 - eureka. However, 
being the cautious kind I thought it was worth doing a double check so I 
closed down completely and rebooted the Knoppix again. It seemed to find 
the card again ok, but when it got to the desktop, the resolution was at 
640x480. When I tried to alter the res it simply didn't allow any other 
setting! So, the same linux distribution found and applied the correct 
settings but then on second boot could not find them!!

Dave


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