On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 05:42:21PM -0600, Benjamin Story wrote: > Hi all, > > I'm finally getting ready to ditch my old Voodoo3 card for something > with a little more oomph. I've been debating between one of the > Matrox dual head cards and the GForce cards. Any war stories with the > newer video cards under Linux? > -- > -- > Benjamin Story
I have two dual Matrox cards at work (not in the same machine). The older one worked fine using the stock mga driver in XFree 3.x with a single monitor. With the Matrox drivers for 4.x I have been running dual-head for quite a while now and it works really well. I believe my newer card needed the drivers from Matrox to work well even with a single monitor although I don't remember the installation in detail. In any event, it is also running the Matrox drivers with 4.x and working fine as a dual head. Matrox packages the drivers with an install script that knows RedHat-like systems. It won't install on a Debian system correctly without help. Basically you have to find the mga_dri.so and mga_drv.o files and copy them to the right places (over your system files). Keep them around since you'll do it every time you install new XFree packages, security updates etc. Glitches. I have only experienced two glitches with the drivers. 1) I can't change video resolution with CTRL-ALT-+ on both screens. For me it works on :0.0 but not :0.1. This hasn't caused me much grief; I just run any program I want at a different resolution on :0.0. It has affected VMWare; it can't really go full-screen on either monitor. Instead I get a "black square" around the borders with my VMWare session in the middle. One more issue with VMWare only is that I can't drag my cursor to the other monitor when it is full-screen. I don't think it is a bug, just a little counter-intuitive. 2) On screen :0.1 there is some kind of issue with acceleration. The only program that is affected is OpenOffice. On that screen, the fonts all display corrupted. No other program has had the same behavior. It goes away if I turn off acceleration on :0.1 (I have to turn it off completely on that screen, not just one of the selected functions). I have decided to just use OO on the other screen since I like the acceleration for all of my other programs. In any event, the only issues I have had are minor, and I would recommend the card. I would recommend it with more enthusiasm if the drivers were opened, but I have been satisfied with them as they are. -- Don Bindner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----------------------------------------------------------------- To get off this list, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with Subject: unsubscribe -----------------------------------------------------------------
