Re: Two video cards ... separate text and graphical usage

On 27 Jan 2008 20:40:38 GMT Dances With Crows <danceswithcrows@xxxxxxx> wrote:
| phil-news-nospam@xxxxxxxx staggered into the Black Sun and said:
|> As an alternative to an issue I have that may be specific to the old
|> video card I am using, I am considering two other options:
|>
|> 1. Finding a NEW video card model that is well supported in Xorg and
|> is also well supported in text mode with SVGATextMode. Unfortunately,
|> SVGATextMode is no longer being maintained
|
| Yeah, forget this.
|
|> 2. Use two video cards. The old card would be used for text mode and
|> the new card would be used for X.
|
| 3. Get a dual-head video card, set it up with separate Screens. Run
| your normal X junk on :0.0, run a maximized xterm (konsole, aterm,
| gnome-terminal...) on :0.1. It'd probably be easier and would certainly
| be more flexible, and you could convert it to Xinerama when you wanted
| to do that.

Actually, I have a dual-head card. The trouble is, it is AGP and my
new computer has PCIe instead of AGP. I then got a dual-head card for
PCIe, but it didn't do text mode right. I might consider using that
PCIe card for the X side of things, but only if I get the mga driver
bug in X fixed (separately posted). I'll consider buying yet another
video card that is better supported in X (dual-head or not), but only
if I can get the text mode to work via the old card at the same time.


|> None of them explained how to use one for text mode (not frame buffer)
|> and the other for X in graphical mode.
|
| Hardly anyone wants to do that, because X is where it's at for 99.5% of
| the users. http://linuxconsole.sourceforge.net/ , however, might be
| worth looking at. It might require some non-n00b-friendly configuration
| to get it working the way you want it.

I'll check it out.

X is where it's at for graphical work, and I do use X a lot. But for
heavy duty text work, the text console has still not been beaten by any
program I've seen in X. Is there something better than xterm that does
do better at text?


|> If anyone wants to suggest to use text under X instead of console text
|> mode, would you be prepared to assist in making text under X work
|> exactly the same under X as it does in console text mode? I'm not
|> sure it is even possible. But if it is, it might involve a lot of
|> work, such as rewriting xterm to use acceleration, and changing the
|> mouse behaviour.
|
| Why would xterm need to handle mouse acceleration? If you want to
| change the mouse behavior in X, that's what xset and multiple frontends
| that change the same accel/thresh numbers xset does are for. There's
| also the Resolution line in the input device stanzas for mice in
| xorg.conf, and xmodmap to remap mouse buttons.

The acceleration I referred to is not the mouse acceleration. The mouse
behaviour issue is how the mouse behaves in and around text characters.
That differs between X with xterm (and generally all other text) and the
text console with gpm.

The acceleration of concern is with things like fast scrolling of text.
The text console can do this very fast by avoiding copying of data and
just changing the scan starting point. And what copying is being done
to move new lines into the screen, is in characters, not pixels. So it
can go very fast and minimizes blocking of programs that spew out a lot
of output.

Other issues are things like how the mouse point associated with the text
on the screen. Very frequently when I am cutting and pasting with the
mouse while in X, the ending, and sometimes the beginning, character gets
lost. If I slow down and do it carefully, it's OK. It just doesn't make
it easy to do it fast because of the careful positioning requirement.
With gpm in text console mode, this problem does not happen.

There are also other details like when doing double and triple clicking
to highlight words or lines, this doesn't work as desired. The list of
characters that are considered to end a word and not spread the highlight
need to be changed. For example, the '/' character stops highlighting of
a word in xterm, but not in gpm. About 40% of what I highlight are file
paths.

I hope you get a clearer understanding of what I am doing, now.

--
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| Phil Howard KA9WGN (ka9wgn.ham.org) / Do not send to the address below |
| first name lower case at ipal.net / spamtrap-2008-01-27-1446@xxxxxxxx |
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