On Wed, 2005-12-21 at 01:33 -0500, steve szmidt wrote:
> On Tuesday 20 December 2005 19:45, Paul M Foster wrote:
> > Paul M Foster wrote:
> > > steve szmidt wrote:
> > >> My older machine has a GeForce4 Ti 4200 which has decent 3D (and is
> > >> really cheap today). Anyway, the point is that using the nvidia
> > >> drivers have never been a real problem. They make the binary driver
> > >> available and you just get one that matches your kernel. So it does
> > >> not a problem.
> > >
> > > Yeah, but I don't want to use a binary driver. That was the point. I'd
> > > rather find a decent GPU that's natively supported by the kernel. I
> > > don't want to go out and look for a driver.
> >
> > ... However, it appears from an extensive Googling that there just
> > aren't any *serious* video cards supported by Linux. ATI and NVidia seem
> > to be far and away the best, and both provide proprietary drivers. In
> > ATI's case, they seem to be flakier.
> >
> > Crap. Looks like I'm stuck, unless someone knows something I don't.
> > (Which is pretty likely! ;-)
>
> They have very good drivers as far as I've seen. There's no searching either.
> They are at the very same spot all year around...
Every ATI card I have set up I have had to hack with the files. The way
they do it is by configuring their own X***config file which messes up
your previous settings. Yeah, I know you can hack the current conf and
change the line to fglrx but it doesn't work as well as when you use all
the options they throw in there. So you end up having to play with the
two files, cutting and pasting and what not to get it right. This is of
course to take advantage of the DRI and GL and such. The vesa driver
does what the ATI one does just as good if you don't do take advantage
of all that stuff. Baahh. I'll take the NVidia one any day. SuSE sets
it up for you (YaST option) but I've used NVidia's installer to get the
bleeding edge driver before. It's soooooo simple. It only asks like 3
questions and away it goes. Then you can use sax2 or just change the
driver line to "nvidia" and you're done with far better results than the
ATI as far as GL and such are concerned. And NVidia's driver is in the
same spot too. On their website! ;^)
Actually, Since Paul is a Debian guy.... he can do the apt-get thing.
http://home.comcast.net/~andrex/Debian-nVidia/installation.html
And here's an excerpt from the Debian ATI Howto that happens to be 8
miles long.....
snip
The driver package provides an automatic configuration tool called
fglrxconfig. Just don't use it, OK? fglrxconfig is useful if you want a
dual-head setup, but before you try that please make sure that a
single-head setup works by editing your X server configuration file as
outlined below. Also note that fglrxconfig will overwrite your existing
X server configuration file!
Edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4:
/snip
http://xoomer.virgilio.it/flavio.stanchina/debian/fglrx-installer.html
Sorry if anybody gets bent over this. It's not intended that way. I'm
basing my comments off of _actually_ using both card vendors multiple
times. If you reply, Facts are good. Flames are bad as again, this is
not intended to do that, but recap my experience for Paul.
HTH!
Mike Branda Jr.
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