[techtalk] Red Hat 7.0 and video cards

[Martin.Caitlyn at epamail.epa.gov]

Nils, thank you for the very useful piece of information.  When I ran the
Red Hat 7 installer at home it just plain out told me that my card wasn't
supported, so I gave up.  In my case it definitely tried to force me into
XFree86 4.

Now, tell me, is this true of Mandrake 7.2 as well.  The installer
definitely didn't give me an option of 3.3.6, nor do I have any such RPMs
on my system.  I need to look at what is on the CDs, I guess.  I run
Mandrake at home and just upgraded this past weekend, and again, I had to
go to an older ATI Mach 64 (2 MB of RAM, PCI, yuck!) to get it to run.  My
Trident card just wouldn't work.  Also, so far as I can tell, there is no
xconfigurator in Mandrake 7.2, just XF86config and the Mandrake-specific
tools.  I would *love* to go back to my 8MB AGP card, but I am not willing
to sacrifice some of the cool stuff in the newer distros.

I miss XF86Setup from 3.3.x.  That made configuring X oh so easy...

Best,
Caity

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Caitlyn M. Martin             martin.caitlyn at epa.gov
Systems Analyst              (919) 541-4441
Lockheed Martin
(a contractor for the US EPA)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                                                                                                            
                    Nils Philippsen                                                                                         
                    <nils at wombat.dialup.fht-ess        To:     Caitlyn Martin/RTP/USEPA/US at EPA                              
                    lingen.de>                         cc:     techtalk at linuxchix.org                                       
                                                       Subject:     Re: [techtalk] Red Hat 7.0 and video cards              
                    01/17/01 11:06 AM                                                                                       
                                                                                                                            
                                                                                                                            



On Tue, 2 Jan 2001 Martin.Caitlyn at epamail.epa.gov wrote:

> That is completely contrary to my experience with the card.  I have two,
> and I have run Mandrake 7.0, Caldera 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, Red Hat 6.0, and
> TurboLinux 4.1 with it, all with great success.  I tend to run at
> 1024x768x32bpp and never have had so much as a hiccup with XFree 86 3.3.x
> and the SVGA server.  It bothers me to have to replace two perfectly good
> cards just to upgrade my X, especially since I know a whole bunch of
cards
> are missing out of 4.0.1.

Due to this, Red Hat Linux 7 ships with XFree86 3.3 servers as well, which
you can use if your card is not supported by XFree86 4. Normally,
Xconfigurator should determine whether to use version 4 or 3.3
automatically. If that fails, you can force the version to use with
"Xconfigurator --preferxf3" or "Xconfigurator --preferxf4" respectively.

Of course you should be able to recycle an old XF86Config. To distinguish
between version 3 and 4, the old style configuration file is
/etc/X11/XF86Config and the new style one (for XF 4) is
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4.

Nils
--
 Nils Philippsen / Berliner Straße 39 / D-71229 Leonberg // +49.7152.209647
nils at wombat.dialup.fht-esslingen.de / nils at redhat.de /
nils at fht-esslingen.de
   The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
   regarded as a criminal offence.                  -- Edsger W. Dijkstra