Trouble getting video cards to work

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Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 23:25:02 -0800 (PST)
To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@redhat.com>

Hi. I have been having a lot of trouble finding a
working video card for Fedora Core 3.

I originally had a Magic Video 64 by IO Magic, but
that only worked in XFree86 3.3.1, and the support was
never ported up to 4 and Xorg.

I then acquired an STB Trio64V+. I sent out a query
to this mailing list about whether this card works or
not. Getting no reply, I downloaded the s3 driver
source for Xorg and tried to figure out whether it was
supported or not. This was to avoid wasting 2-3 hours
on an install to see whether it worked or not. The
code was too complicated, and although there was
driver code for that chip, it was not clear if the
code was in the execution path. So, I ended up having
to waste 2-3 hours installing Fedora Core 3, only to
find that the STB Trio64V+ was not compatible, since
it crashed during the boot, probably when trying to
bring up the X server.

I then bought a Matrox Millennium II. It worked right
away, but it was very unstable. Xorg would not stay
up more than a few hours, and occasionally would crash
in 5 minutes or so. It usually crashed while browsing
web, but it even crashed when working on an xterm,
which should not be graphically very demanding. It
also always crashed when I logged out of my userid
(the Actions menu). It was almost bearable to work
with, but the machine crahsned 6 times per day,
compared to my Windows 2000 machine which only crashes
once or twice a week. Or my RedHat 7.2 machine, which
crashes once or twice a month. This was the Linux
BSOD type crash, requiring a power cycle.

I then wised up a bit, and decided to buy two cards at
a time. I bought an Diamond S3 Virge card with 4MB
and a ATI Graphics Pro Turbo Mach64 card. The S3
Virge card had an interesting problem. The monitor
scanning would return garbage characters instead the
true name of the monitor. I knew what the monitor's
name was, since the Matrox scan found it correctly.
After a lot of thinking, I realized that the automatic
xorg configuration was corrupting the xorg.conf file
with the garbage monitor name characters, and the Xorg
server was choking in them. I got the clever idea to
write the file with the Matrox card, and then, in
rescue mode, put the correct monitor definition from
the newly prepared file into the xorg.conf for the S3
Virge. That did it! The S3 Virge gave a graphical
login. And, no more crashes during logout! But,
there was another problem. The machine would usually
BSOD crash when selecting text or filling out a text
box in Firefox. I don't think that this is a problem
with Firefox, since the Matrox card, although
unstable, could do most of these text sessions. With
the S3 Virge card, it was impossible to send e-mail
through a WWW page, since it would usually crash while
entering text. But, at least no more crashes during
logout. The number of crashes went up, however, from
6 per day to 4 per hour, since I would often forget.
Also, simply entering text into the Firefox locator
bar would often BSOD crash the system. It was
possible to access webmail through links (the text
browser), but this was onerous.

I then tried the second card that I bought, an ATI
Mach64. This got me into an infinite loop when the
boot process found out that it could not successfully
launch the X server. It then offered to automatically
reconfigure and/or restart the server. Neither
worked, and got back to the initial state. Needless
to say, the machine was unusable at this point. I
logged into linux rescue mode, and found out that the
xorg.conf thad a corrupt display section. I was able
to extract the display section from the Matrox
configuration file (see, that Matrox card was useful,
if only to produce a partially good template) and
replace the bad lines in the xorg.conf file for the
ati card. This worked!!!! but only for 256 colors,
which makes the machine difficult to use with digital
photos, which was one reason that I wanted to have it.

Is there any easier way to go about installing Fedora
Core 3. I still don't have a working system, and I
have a stack of 5 video cards, none of which
completely work. And all of them are in the
www.tldp.org hardware howto documentation page. I'm
still wondering if there is a real list of what really
works under Fedora Core 3. Maybe these cards can be
made to work by tweaking? If so, is there a tweak
guide available? My biggest problem is Linux BSOD
(cursor freezes or just disappears, alt-ctrl-del is
ineffective).

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