Matt sent us the
story over at SGI, officially confirming that they have worked with Number Nine to release the drivers for their uber-cool flat screen 1600SW into 3.3.3.1 of
XFree86. The two will also be working more closely together in the future as well.
OT, but yeah, I think so... (Score:1)
Sgi as a company presents a confusing marketing strategy coupled with their blind, arrogant, attitude brought on by visible, but financially insignificant, successes in Hollywood. It's too bad, they make simply awe-inspiring boxes.
Incredible technology. Laughable financial and marketing strategies.
Does this mean future support for Linux on VMs?
Mal --
About darn time (Score:1)
matguy
Net. Admin.
ha! (Score:2)
To him I say: ha!
Log
graphics cards (Score:1)
Don't get me wrong,
Its a very cool step,
but IIRC it is way easier to perform a hostile reverse engineering of monitor drivers than graphics card drivers...
when will SGI's graphics subsystem be supported?
Already supported, you know... (Score:1)
-RISCy Business | Rabid System Administrator and BOFH
Next, we need Multi-Head Support (Score:1)
What about the drivers, where are they? (Score:1)
I've used the drivers in the current release (3.3.3.1) with the same card (with an ordinary CRT), and they are buggy.
/Jakob
Huh? Been running fine for months under XF86. (Score:1)
I'm glad to see SGI's official blessing for XFree86, but I've been running this setup under Linux for 4 months already.
I purchased the SGI DFP Solution pack back in February. There was already support for it under XFree86 (3.3.3.1) and Xi's Accellerated X. After trying both for a while, I kept using XF86 because it seemed faster and more stable.
The only tricky part with XF86 is the modelines. I tried to figure out the proper modelines myself, but failed. I checked back at xfree.org and some kind soul had posted the correct ones. Popped them in and it works fine. 1600x1024 in glorious 32-bit. I still have problems with the console text being corrupted after exiting X, but that is a minor issue to me.
I have to agree with an earlier poster, the beta OpenGL driver for Windows isn't very good. It seems to run OK with Quake II and SiN, but Half-life crashes. And though it looks better, the software renderer runs faster on my system (PII 350MHz), so I still use that instead.
Re:graphics cards (Score:2)
Monitor drivers? I'm not sure what you are getting at here, but the drivers SGI is releasing will let X talk to the Number 9 card and the Number 9 card talk to the flatscreen.
Re:TNT2 >no you cant (Score:1)
VESA fudged the digital interface and it will take a while to get venders surporting it as they chose a solution wich was hard to get working while the laptop people where saying HEY look at this to all the venders so hope and prey that nVidia did the right thing and went for VESA
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
Re:Console text corruption (Score:1)
Re:Already supported, you know... (Score:2)
I also want DVD! (Score:1)
I am in the unusual situation of moving into a vintage Airstream trailer, 22 feet long. This makes flat panels look especially appealing, because even my short-depth 17" Trinitron will have trouble squeezing in anywhere that I can still work on it.
If I could hook a computer with a Free OS up to this monitor with a DVD player, I would happily jettison my 13" television, which I use mainly for movie-playback anyhow. A 17.3" widescreen would be a much nicer way to watch So I Married an Axe Murderer
Someday
timothy
Re:ha! (Score:1)
That's odd - the Accelerated-X server (4.1.2, perhaps with an update to add RevIV-FP support, and 5.0) works fine for me on Debian 2.1, Red Hat 5.2, FreeBSD 3.1, and Solaris 7 (except for a couple of glitches).
No Nine surrport before has been good (Score:1)
is the card any good ?
what are its features ?
oh well please tell me would you ?
cheers
john
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
I've been using my 1600 SW with Linux since Feb (Score:1)
Re:ha! (Score:1)
Re:OpenGL driver in Win98 (Score:1)
I don't recommend this card if you ever plan to use it with Windows. (Linux works well, though.)
TNT2 (Score:1)
Re:Already supported, you know... (Score:1)
My guess is that they realized that it is the Linux users who build their own computer, who look for than just gaming power in a video card, which is what the Rev IV is, and are more likely to take the time to pull apart their machine to upgrade. It is a smart business move on their part to give support to Linux.
Chances are very good that S3 is going to be moving to join the bandwagon soon. With a couple big name companies like Matrox and #9 already supporting Linux, and if they have any market research they will join up soon. They are probably spending too much time working on the buyout/merger with Diamond right now to make another major move like support Linux. It is only a matter of time before they support Linux anyway, any graphics company that keeps up with their market research will realize that the Linux community spends a disproportionate amount of money upgrading their computers to the latest and greatest stuff compaired to the average Joe Shmo Windows user. To not cater to the power user is a fatal flaw for any computer periferal company like S3.
Re: Console text corruption (Score:1)