[SWLUG] graphics cards

[Steve Hill]

On Wed, 3 May 2006, Jonathan Wright wrote:

>> many of the distributions have given up on that framebuffer boot
>> sequence thing and start X up as soon as possible to give the pretty
>> progress meters.
>
> Actually, IIRC, that's not X. It's an overlay on top of the vesa frame-buffer 
> and shutdown down when Xorg starts.

Under Fedora it's definately Xorg (or at least it reads the Xorg config 
and uses the same driver and modelines, since it displays quite happilly 
on my TV when my MythTV box boots, which involves using the nvidia driver 
and non-standard modelines).

> As for crashing - I've never had a problem. Solid as a rock. The only problem

The nVidia drivers used to be pretty unstable (~4 years ago) but in recent 
times they're pretty good.  I've certainly not had a serious stability bug 
in years (although there are still plenty of less serious problems you'll 
encounter if you try and use the cards to do non-standard things).

> I've had with Xorg (and even though I'm running a beta of the new V7 modular 
> system) is with Firefox, which triggers an Xorg overload when accessing the 
> Plesk Control Panel when it has the option to prevent you using the page 
> until it's loaded set.

I run the latest drivers under Fedora 5 on my MythTV box (with an MX440 
card) and there are only 2 problems I've found so far:
1. The OpenGL stuff in Myth flickers badly when the system is under 
load... although I suspect this is a Myth bug rather than a driver bug
2. Anything played through XV seems to get magically deinterlaced by the 
drivers/card when displaying on an interlaced device.  This is a little 
annoying and is something they claimed to have fixed in this driver.  They 
have however fixed all the non-XV stuff so that doesnt' get deinterlaced 
anymore.

The minor annoyance on my workstation is that the nVidia drivers are 
incompatable with Xen. :(

> Any future graphics card, without a doubt will be an nVidia model! :)

Me to, unless something open comes out.  Intel chipsets are aparantly 
pretty good when it comes to openness, but you'll only find them on 
motherboards rather than on separate cards. :(

-- 

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence