<quote who="Andrew Cowie"> > > > Matrox in both cases? > > > > Yeah, same card in fact. > > Help me out here ... if Matrox uses an nvidia chipset, right? > > If that's not correct, then please consider this for general interest...
Hell no, Matrox use their own chips, and are very nice in terms of releasing specs and so on. > The voodoo you have to go through to get dual monitors to work is > somewhat extreme, though (amazingly) really well documented[*]. > > Jeff's comment about them and Xinerama reminded me that ***they > implemented their own Xinerama, IN the driver*** which means, against > all logic, you DON'T call `X +xinerama`. Makes it barf. They advise > against it... > > The keyword for the driver option you're searching on is "TwinView" (Yeah, this is not the case for Matrox at all.) > * As you know, I'm running Gentoo. Half the reason I do is so that the > OS doesn't give me hassle when I have the temerity to want to use a > vendor supplied driver even if it happens to be binary non-free. (Nor should any other distro, just drop the library in and go.) > I gather there are Debian friendly ways to get the vendor driver from > Nvidia. As I understand it the free reverse-engineer one is terrible - > it certainly makes a hash of the dual head thing. The Free one is fine for simple 2D, but does not include any advanced features provided by the hardware, even features that really shouldn't have any IP concerns on Nvidia's side (the driver is not terrible, we just can't do a bunch of stuff). Consider that Nvidia don't even release the specs of the el-boring-o 10/100 NIC on their mobo chipset... Crazy. Moral of the story: Don't buy Nvidia. - Jeff -- GVADEC 2004: Kristiansand, Norway http://2004.guadec.org/ 100% Pure Slashdot Wisdom: "Source code gives a whole new meaning to free software." -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
