On Sunday 18 July 2004 00:02, Andrew Graupe wrote: > Let me start by saying: I like linux. I think the world would be better > if everyone used it, and at least a bit more spyware free. That being > said, I have just spent most of the day trying to get 3D acceleration > with my integrated S3 UniChrome chip. I will say this in favor of > nVIDIA and ATi, at least they're common enough that people have come up > with workarounds for the various linux bugs. I write this near > midnight, after a marathon session of patching, kernel recompiles, and > other unpleasantness. That being said, I will still have to reboot > often if I want optimum performance because gentoo-dev-sources (which is > fast for normal things) can't be patched to work with VIA video chips. > I think I'll stay with this for now. At least if the Neverwinter Nights > install (the entire reason I'm doing this) goes without a hitch, it will > mean a great advancement in terms of linux games. I guess we don't hear > about linux games that much because it's so phenomenally hard to get to > this point. >
I don't think that your situation means linux is not ready for the desktop. You are trying to attempt something fairly complicated. The integrated VIA video chips do not work overly well. Obviously you are into gaming. I don't know of many serious windows gamers who use an on-board video card. You get what you pay for with oboard cards. IMO. As for the VIA chips. I have an integrated KM400 video chip. I had problems getting it to work properly. By default X used the vesa driver ... everything worked fine I just had no acceleration. You can get the X drivers from VIA's website for all the integrated chips, although they are built for a limited number of distributions, and therefore they are only specific kernels, and 2.6 is not yet supported. I recently upgraded to 2.6 kernel, and now I have no acceleration _again_. Apparently from the message boards you can make it work, by custom building the kernel and X and on and on. I wasn't into that. If it really bothered me that much ... I'd just go and get a well known supported video card. My desktop works absolutely fantastic without acceleration. I have email, web, office suites, P2P, development for all of my work, multimedia (sound, imaging, CD burning). So I can't watch Microsoft Format videos in full screen mode with MPlayer. That's not a fault of the linux desktop, but rather a fault of the hardware I'm using. > I don't mean to flame or troll, but this is the truth. Linux could be a > *TEENSY* bit more userfriendly. If the patches for VIA support are out > there, why haven't they been merged into the main kernel tree? I have > to think that VIA is a fairly big value-mobo manufacturer (the PC in > question is an HP; imagine how many are out there), so it's not a fringe > brand. At least it's done now. > Alan Cox wrote a via driver for use in the kernel. The kernel driver is not the issue, it's the X windows driver, and from what I have seen from Alan's messages, it will be quite a task to get the HW acceleration to work. VIA can't even get it right. I installed _their_ driver and I still had wonky things going on. I never have the same problems under the vesa driver ... there's just no full screen. Andy _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
