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VESA mode
Acronym for Video Electronics Standards Association. Also the name of the standard interface for accessing high-resolution and high-color video modes developed by VESA.

 

 
Supported Hardware

Before installing Zeta, you should verify that your system is supported. At the very least, you should make sure your motherboard, CPU, graphics, sound, and network cards are compatible with Zeta.

Is My System Supported?
Zeta has a wide range of supported hardware. On yellowTAB's web pages (http://www.yellowtab.com/support/hardware/) you will find a list of the hardware compatible with Zeta and information about all known problems. If you want to make sure that Zeta works correctly on your computer you can see if your hardware is supported using the search function.

Is there hardware listed on our site that doesn't work correctly? Tell us about it!

Do you have Zeta running on hardware not listed on our web site? Tell us about it! There are probably people wondering why that specific hardware is not listed!

Running Zeta with a not supported graphic card
If you find that your graphics card is not supported, you should be able to use it in unaccelerated VESA mode. While not optimal, you will at least get full color and resolution this way.

Make boot options permanent
If your machine includes some sort of hardware that that prevents Zeta from booting properly, you may need to enter the boot options menu (press the Spacebar when the bootloader appears) and select Safe mode, disable SMP, Don't call the BIOS, or even debug mode. If it turns out that you need to invoke one of these options every time you boot, you can make these options permanent.

in /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/sample and you'll find the following files:

ata.sample
atapi.sample
awe64
kernel.sample
vesa.sample

Each of them includes various options relating to dozens of boot-time parameters. You should be able to determine what each of them do by opening them in a text editor and poking around. If you want to activate one of the options in these files, copy it to /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers and uncomment (remove the "#") any lines you want to activate.

kernel.sample includes options mirroring the choices shown in the boot options menu, while the others will let you configure specific sound card settings, set vesa modes for graphics cards, and set advanced options for ATA and ATAPI devices.

You can also use the virtual_memory file to establish a swap file of a smaller or larger size than the Virtual Memory preferences panel will allow. Note that setting your swap file to a lower size than recommended will probably impact performance, and is not recommended.

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