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

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.