Graphics mode on a Compaq Armada 1580?

[Torfinn Ingolfsen]

A friend gave me this old laptop, and I am trying to turn it into a
digital pictureframe. The laptop is a Compaq Armada 1580DMT. It has a
Pentium/P55C processor @ 150MHz, 16MB RAM, a 2 GB hard drive and a
cd-rom. The LCD screen is 800x600, and it has a Cirrus Logic GD7548
graphics controller with 1 MB of VideoRAM. (I told you it was an old
laptop.) So, how do I turn it into a picture frame? I installed FreeBSD
4.9-RELEASE on it, and then I have two options:
a) install SVGAlib and seejpeg or zgv
b) install XFree86 and use xloadimage or another program to show the
    pictures on the X root window

Option a.
I installed SVGAlib, and seejpeg. However, testing with vgatest shows
that SVGAlib only detects the GD7548 as having 512k memory, and this
limits my display options somewhat (I get 800x600 with 256 colors, so
it's not too bad). 
Does anybody know how to make svaglib see the full 1MB of VideoRAM on
this machine?
Sadly, zgv is not ported to FreeBSD, and it doesn't look like an easy
task to do so.

Option b.
I have XFree86 4.3.0 installed, my /etc/X11/XF86Config set up, and when
I start XFree86 on its own, I get a screen and can move the mouse, and
kill the X server (with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace). Everything working, right?
Unfortunately, no. When I try to start XFree86 with just one client (ie.
'xterm -geometry +0-100' in my .xinitrc), the X screen freezes before
the client comes up on the display. I can see the grey screen, but the
mouse cursor is not moving. Using ps and top, I can see that the XFree86
process is running, the xterm process is idle. I can kill the XFree86
process, but then the text terminals (Alt-F1 etc.) are also dark. No
error messages in any logs. I have to shutdown the machine in order to
get the display working again. Hmm... just a minute. Ok, setting the
NoAccel option in the XF86Config fixed that. The problem is that it
takes a while to start up the X server.

Do I need to trim my XFree86 setup in order to reduce memory usage?
(see the attached XF86Config file)

Finally, does anybody know of a nice script to do the picture slideshow?
I will load pictures either from a CD, or from a network share (Samba).
-- 
Torfinn Ingolfsen,
Norway

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