[sclug] Vanilla linux-friendly graphics card?

[Dickon Hood]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 10:34:17 +0100, John Stumbles wrote:
: Any suggestions for a cheap graphics card that plays well with Linux (in 
: the sense of not requiring closed-source, possibly buggy drivers, for 
: example). Needs to do up to 1280x1024 24-bit colour but no fancy 3-D 
: games or anything like that.

I've stopped using my nVidia pair in my desktop, as I thought the binary
blob may have been contributing to my system lockups (it doesn't seem to
have been that; the ATI I've replaced them with hasn't altered the
frequency).  On the whole, the ATI drivers aren't anywhere near as good as
the nVidia binary blob -- which is surprisingly good, for a blob -- and
the 3D support for the newer ATI cards is woeful at best and missing at
worst.  Xv support is also not as good yet.

3D support is becoming more important these days, as X moves towards
compositing window managers; these all require some level of 3D to support
the layering, AIUI.

Any cheap ATI should be driveable by either the radeon or radeonhd
drivers, and anything less than a decade or so old should do that
resolution.

: Or if anyone's got something kicking around, looking for a nice 
: FLOSS-friendly home :-)

: It could fit a standard PCI slot or there's a longer slot the 
: now-defunct NVIDIA card came out of (AGP?)

Probably.  Usually brown, usually closest to the CPU.

-- 
Dickon Hood

Due to digital rights management, my .sig is temporarily unavailable.
Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.  We apologise for the
inconvenience in the meantime.

No virus was found in this outgoing message as I didn't bother looking.