Pete Zaitcev wrote:
On Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:57:37 +0000, Richard Hughes <hughsient@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
So if I was buying a new laptop sometime soonish, what chipset is best
for all this new accelerated X stuff?
Apropos this, what is the situation with VIA Unichrome? Mike?
IIRC, they had an open driver as a plug-in for old X, and it was
poorly written, so someone started a rewrite. Did anything come
out of it? You know, those Averatecs really look attractive...
There are about 100 via driver forks nowadays. The original via
code, which it seems via updates once a year or so with a huge
press release. The differences in their code seem to get merged
into the X.Org via driver.
Then there is the unichrome project - a fork of that, and
openchrome, a fork of unichrome. Why so many forks? Certain
individuals don't play well with others essentially.
Which one to use? We ship the X.Org one, and never see any
bug reports, so I assume it must work well enough for FC users,
but I've never ran it personally, so don't know how stable or
reliable it really is, or what the featureset is.
I guess people probably start out using the Xorg driver, and
if it doesn't work perhaps they hop ship to one of the other 2
drivers. Hard to say because there is almost zero feedback. ;)
I'm often asked which laptop chipset one should buy, or which
laptop chipset is best supported. Here are 2 answers I generally
give, and they're dead honest, albeit a bit blunt. I say that
because sometimes people think I'm blowing them off, when I'm
really just giving the reality of things:
1) None of the video chipsets are supported "the best". Roll
a dice, you get a video chipset that has some supported
features, along with various bugs/problems to work around.
or
2) Whichever video chip works best for one's purposes after
they manually test every laptop on the market with the current
drivers, and decide which one meets their needs.
Yes, these answers suck, but they reflect reality, which also
sucks. My advice is don't buy a laptop unless you can get
by with the kernel console driver and 24 VCs. ;)
--
Mike A. Harris * Open Source Advocate * http://mharris.ca
Proud Canadian.
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