[sclug] Video driver problem

[Philip Hands]

At Tue, 12 Nov 2002 12:00:20 +0000,
Tony Sumner wrote:
> 
> I have been corresponding with RedHat support about the problem I had
> (CTRL-ALT-Fn works but ALT-F7 doesn't) and it turns out that there is
> not yet a supported driver for the S3 chipset with Trio64V+ in version
> 4 of XFree86. Strange; the s3 driver works ok in every way except that
> one. So what do I do now:
> 
>   1. re-install RedHat 7.1 (and lose OpenOffice);
>   2. wait for XFree86 to come up with a driver;
>   3. Install Debian instead :-)
>   4. buy another card (and enjoy more than 1MB of RAM)
> 
> What do you recommend? If 4, what is your favourite card?

Option 3, clearly :-)

Well, except that you'll be using bits of testing & unstable to get
openoffice.org, which works fine, but does require a little more care
at upgrade time than if you were sticking to stable (not that anyone
ever does on desktops).

If you go for option 4, I can do some pretty cheap video cards:

  Mercury AGP 32MB SIS305 AG305-32 SDRAM     13.20 GBP +VAT

or if you want PCI (which I guess you would):

  Jetway 32MB WONDER 5000 TNT M64 SDR PCI    23.10 GBP +VAT

You'll need to check the chipset support just to be sure (SIS305 &
TNT-M64 respectively), but I'd imagine they'd be a little better than
what you've got ;-)

The SiS looks like it might not be supported, in which case, if you're
after an AGP card, I can do you a:

  MERCURY 32MB AGPx4 S3 SAVAGE4              14.30 GBP +VAT

Obviously, you can spend more than that if you wish.  Postage may need
to be charged on top.

Cheers, Phil.