[wrt the Matrox Millenium] > R> This card works fine with linux, but you have to buy a commercial X > R> server as the XFree86 servers don't support it. I got mine from > R> XInside, and it works fine. > > Sorry to follow myself up, but Bruce's post made me rememeber that the > XInside server won't work with Debian "out of the box", you have to > get libtermcap.so.2 and stick it somewhere ld.so can find it.
OK. However, notice that the XInside server (AcceleratedX) is incredibly memory-hungry: it consumes approximately 3 times as much RAM as a similarly configured XFree server. It is faster, no doubt about that, but consider this: Start X (1280x1024, 16bpp), run olvwm, a couple of xterms, an Emacs and Netscape, edit a few files, browse a little. AcceleratedX will happily start at around 12M and proceed to take up around 20-24M of RAM, while XFree, with the same treatment will stay at approximately 8-9M. This led me to replace a Matrox Millenium with an XFree-supported card (in this case, a Diamond Stealth64 (S3 968)). X is slower (about half the speed of AcceleratedX on the Matrox, as measured by xbench), but the system is overall much better. It used to be the case that a machine with 32M would constantly be swapping because of the X server. After the swap, the system feels much better. I tried the same thing on a notebook and got similar results (AcceleratedX would be 4x faster gain and take up 3x more memory). Note that for the portable, the XFree server used was XF86_SVGA while in the desktop system it's obviously XF86_S3. My conclusion: if you want to stick with the Matrox and AcceleratedX, you'll need at least 48 or 64M. (for 1280x1024, 16bpp). Salvador
