Not sure I would have described the G400 (Matrox G400 right?) as open-source friendly. IIRC Matrox used to ship a black box binary that was needed to make various features work, without it you got a 2D framebuffer and some quality DACs, which aren't very relevant at this point because everybody is upgrading to digital video...
On my Fedora 16 box with 3.3.4, I seem to have a kernel module named 'mga' which claims to be for "Matrox G200/G400" and requires binary firmware I don't have (I probably have a G400 somewhere but no slot to put it in) but I
- don't know for sure that this works with your specific model (of course)
- don't know if it enables sufficient features to make a modern glitzy UI work properly, e.g. GNOME 3
Posted Jun 12, 2012 16:19 UTC (Tue) by xtifr (subscriber, #143)
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Nope, I assure you, as a member of Debian, I did my research before buying this card, and it was one of the very few with full open-source support for 3d acceleration at the time. No blobs involved.