Andrew J. Kopciuch wrote:
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
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It's working now, which points to the fact that it can be done. I got
an ebuild of a patched xorg-6.7.0, so that worked. I then got the epia1
patch for the 2.6.7 kernel, and everything works fine now. Although if
video performance isn't good, I will still end up getting an nVIDIA, and
all my efforts will be for naught.
An open question: what kind of framerate do you guys get from glxgears?
Regards,
Andrew
--
My computer beat me at chess, I beat it at boxing. We're even.
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