Text 13875, 87 rader
Skriven 2010-01-22 13:01:00 av WAYNE CHIRNSIDE (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av ROBERT WOLFE
Ärende: Re: video driver
========================
-=> ROBERT WOLFE wrote to WAYNE CHIRNSIDE <=-

 RW> WAYNE CHIRNSIDE wrote to MAURICE KINAL:

 WC> Well now slashdot.com has come out with two contradictory
 WC> statements about video driver support for Nvidea video cards.
 WC>
 WC> The first a month or two back they said Nvidia was making its drivers
 WC> open source for Linux.
 WC>
 WC> Now it seems the Linux 2.6.33 kernel due out in March will included
 WC> reverse engineered Linux drivers.
 WC>
 WC> Either way, it can't be soon enough for me.

 RW> Yeah, I know that whenever I install Ubuntu on my nVidia-based Dell
 RW> Vostro laptop, it has to go out and fetch the proprietary drivers, but
 RW> those seem to work very well.


Well here the situation is defined by the hardware and BIOS's on the
motherboard and BIOS'ed nvidia
card.

The motherboard ATI Rage Pro Mach 64 sucks away 64 meg of the available 384 meg
of RAM
and with the daemons loaded for KDE with Firefox that's over the top for this
system, crash and burn.

While the Nvidia can be wrangled into submission with existing Linux drivers
unfortunately I had a copy of the Nvidia driver in a download directory and
when installing Mplayer
it found that .run binary and installed the KDE desktop driver :-( 

Works pretty well in KDE but messes up how the system responds at the command
line
with Mplayer due to MX-400 Nvidia's lackof ability to do 24 bit color depth at
768x1024.

The default the Nvidia driver installs in lilo.conf is vga 773 which is the
limiting factor
as I prefer 768x1024 resolution however with vga 773 you lose color depth which
is the part
I had rather cleverly circumvented by launching a different setting and
customising
the xorg.conf files.

I had it working both places until overconfidence caused me to listen to some
bad advice
not thinking I'd run into other distracting influences thus not being able to
easily duplicate my
customisation at the present time. 
That is fudging the system just right as well as commenting out the ATI card in
various configuration files.

It'll be a while before I get around to correcting the situation and that will
be done
by reinstalling Slack 12.2 on  the second physical drives first partition.

There are just so many problems introduced via the BIOS conflicts you have to
fundge the system
a bit to get it all working right.

Were there a way to turn off the ATI video card in the BIOS this would not
happen
but the only options in the motherboard BIOS are onboard or not, no OFF option
so
both cards are recognised upon boot.

Things are a bit dicey here due to certain circumstances and if all works out
I may well make a major upgrade off this old 1998 Aptiva.

Got half the cash to upgrade now.
Guess I'll just bear with it a while longer until the situation resolves one
way or another
and then make my move.

Plan is to get a really cheap MicroATX Biostar motherboard, 4 Gig RAM and AMD
64 X2
for right at $200 from CompUSA and at a later date go to the full ATX
motherboard
with better slot PCI, PCIe and PCIe 16 options.

Depends upon the way certain winds blow though. 
 
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