The joys of Linux
I finally got fed up with the glacial slowness of SuSE Enterprise Linux v9 on the factory case, so I pulled the SuSE disk and replaced it with a 20gb slackware disk that was on a laptop that had committed PCMCIA suicide. It worked fine, except for one teeny problem. And that teeny problem was that X11 didn't work on the 1600SW at all, even when I took an X configuration file that had been known to work before.
In the old days, when Xfree86 was at version 3.x, I could get X11 working on the 1600sw, no matter whether I used a #9 Revolution 4 or a 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1 (a video card that comes with it's own space heater; I've modded it so it just has a big old heatsink without a fan, and that heatsink gets almost too hot to touch after the video card has been running for a while. But now that X.org has updated to a Bigger! And! Better! version of the X server (and now that the Free Software Fundamentalists have turned to attack the XFree86 people for having the temerity to insist that people be properly credited for their contributions to the project), it not only doesn't work, but it doesn't work in a most worthless way; if the X configuration can't find the mouse, it doesn't fail. No, it seems to just mangle the screen and keyboard, then spin there until I reboot the machine.
It took me a long time to find that out, and after fixing it the keyboard would at least come back after the screen got mangled, so I could then kill the offending X display and peer through the debugging output to see if I could (I couldn't) figure out why X11 was simply failing.
I guess I'll just drag XFree86 3.3.6 over from my Mastodon development box and try to get it to compile on the factory case. Eventually. Right now it seems like it's more work than it's worth, except to whine about on TSFR.