Linux device driver availability (wasOLS: The state of Linux wireless networking) [LWN.net]

Linux device driver availability (wasOLS: The state of Linux wireless networking)

Posted Aug 2, 2008 21:23 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: OLS: The state of Linux wireless networking by tialaramex
Parent article: OLS: The state of Linux wireless networking

Thus, try removing the configuration file and starting the X server.

I ultimately did essentially that. But if you have to remove a file in order to use a new video controller, you're already in more-painful-than-Windows territory. Especially if you have to find an expert like you to tell you to do it.

The mention of DVI makes me wonder if you had something more serious wrong though, DVI ought to work with the hardware-specific drivers for Intel or ATI hardware old enough to be supported, or even with a lot of nVidia cards - you are seeing text through this DVI connector prior to X starting, right ?

No, I've never seen anything come out of the DVI connector, and I tried every scenario except putting the card in a Windows machine. It's a Matrox G400; the 'mga' driver man page, and some morsels I found on the web, suggest that you have to specifically turn on DVI and the only known software that can do that is a closed source X module from Matrox and Matrox does not offer a version compatible with the X server in my Debian Etch system.

This is just the card that was laying around. But if I had set out to buy something to drive my DVI monitor, I don't know how I would have known what to choose.

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Linux device driver availability (wasOLS: The state of Linux wireless networking)

Posted Aug 3, 2008 9:13 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Well, I guess my point was more that the distro oughtn't to create this file in the first
place. One of X.org's biggest problems these days seems to be the little programs that Linux
distributors knocked together in Perl or C ten years ago that try to create a "correct"
configuration, often at install time. Obviously anything that the distro manually configures
at install time and which subsequently needs changing is going to be a pain for the user.

We can't really blame the distributors for doing this back when XFree86 wasn't smart enough to
just pick a working driver and configure it, but we can blame them for not re-assessing this
decision some time between when X was first able to run without configuration and today. By
the point when Etch was released such a file was necessary for only a tiny minority of users,
and so it should not be written by default.

You won't have to remove the file again - it should stay gone (unless sadly you have to
recreate it due to one of the outstanding limitations of the auto-configured X server, but
fixing these ought to be a priority)

I have to say I did not realise that they made G400s with DVI, I guess it figures given the
niche where Matrox makes money but it was still a surprise to me. My G400 just had a single
VGA output. Yeah, that chipset is not well supported and mine has been in a junk pile for some
number of years. Apparently its video BIOS doesn't enable the DVI output (else you'd see
something) so that means it's not just Linux, any OS without explicit support for that
hardware won't work with DVI on that chip, which is pretty sad.

I don't think there's much chance that anyone will look at a nearly 10 year old chip now and
think "Ooh, reverse engineering the DVI output looks like a fun project for a rainy weekend"
so you may be SOL, sorry. And I can see how you'd feel misled, the G400 is documented as
working, without a caveat about that DVI output.

X configuration files, DVI on the G400

Posted Aug 8, 2008 12:40 UTC (Fri) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link]

Yes, on all the Radeon cards I have tried Debian (and its derivatives) creates an xorg.conf file that does not work, and if I delete it and start X, the card just works beautifully. Its as if Debian and its derivatives were staffed by Nvidia employees.

Concerning the Matrox G400, I used to use a G450, and its DVI output has a rather limited bandwidth that allows only 1280x1024 with regular modes. I used a special mode to make it display 1600x1200.