I have just spent most of Sunday afternoon trying to get a
Matrox Millenium G200 working under XFree86. Not yet had any luck
though...
The problem is that when I load it up via startx, I get a
virtual screen of just 320x204 and on a 17" monitor, and that is a total
joke! The actual desktop seems to be 1024x768. Even when I specify
in xconf that only 1024x748 resolutions may be used in any of the colour depths
I get this problem. Yes I have tried editing the configuration file itself
and removing all references to lesser resolutions!
First thing I did to sort it out was to upgrade XFree86 from
v3.3 to v3.3.3.1. That meant I was able to select my graphics card from
the list presented in xconf which I was not able to do previously due to lack of
support. I selected the Matrox Millenium G200 SD 8MB which is a reasonable
choice. At that point I thought my problems were over!
I think the server is rejecting my card and defaulting to a
generic vga driver which has a maximum of 320x204 res :-(. On exiting
XFree86 I can see the following on my screen:
blah blah blah
(--) SVGA: PCI: Matrox Unknown chipset (0x0521) rev 1, Memory
@ 0xe7000000, 0x01f800000
(--) SVGA: chipset: generic
(**) SVGA: videoram 8192K
(--) SVGA: clocks: 25.18
(**) SVGA: Using 8bpp, Depth 8, Color weight: 666
(--) SVGA: Using builtin driver modes
(--) SVGA: Builtin mode: 320x204
(--) SVGA: Virtual resolution set to 320x204
blah blah blah
How can I stop this rejection of my video card? I don't
think I have given any inaccurate information in the xconf. Has anyone
else successfully got one of these cards working? They are pretty common
so there must be someone!
Oh, BTW, is it possible that when I upgraded XFree86 that I
didn't have all the tgz files there and the actual driver for my card was thus
not installed even though it appears in the xconf card listing? It didn't
complain at all during the upgrade and I included all the tgz's specified
in the release notes. However there were a load more tgz files in the
directory on the FTP server that I didn't download.
Got to get this fixed, from what I have seen, XFree86 is
looking good, perhaps when I can use it I will be glad I am making this gradual
switch from Windows!!! :-)
Rupert Burbidge
