"Mike A. Harris" wrote: > This card is *NOT* an ATI produced card. Any cards not made by > ATI, may or may not work at all with XFree86. If a board vendor > who has licenced ATI's technology makes the board work *exactly* > like ATI's own hardware, then it should work. If they change the > design, then it may or may not work. I do not have any non ATI > boards using ATI chips. > > I have had various reports from people that they could not get > Radeon 7500 and other cards working without tweaking things. All > cases so far, their hardware was not ATI boards. As far as I could tell, the card was made by ATI - there was no other manufacturer on the box. I should add I sold the card today, so can't at this second double-check that fact, but I'm not aware of any other make being obvious. Someone at work bought the card from me, but since he was ill today, the card is still on his desk. I'll double-check the box tomorrow. > In order for this hardware to be supported properly in XFree86, > and in Red Hat Linux, someone who has the hardware, needs to > experiment with config file settings, and then file a Request for > Enhancement bug report in bugzilla, including their config file, > X server log, "lspci -v" and "lspci -vn" output, and preferably > the exact board manufacturer's name, and the marketing name the > board is marketed as, ie: Radeon 7500 whizbang 2000 > By using the Subvendor and Subdevice ID's, I can add new entries > for that specific card to the database and tweak the > configurations. I've bought an Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti4200 based card instead, made in this case by Inno. Inno does not produce GNU/Linux drivers, but I was hoping the Nvida drivers (from Nvidia's web site) would have worked. So far I've not managed to get the Nvidia drivers to work, but to be fair I've not put a lot of time into this, whereas a wasted a *lot* of time on the Radeon 7500 before giving up. The Redhat 7.3 drivers do at least work on the Inno GeForce 4 Ti4200, albeit not at the full resolution - for some reason, I have very few resolutions/colour options to choose from. The card is detected in Redhat 7.3 as a GeForce 4 (generic), whereas there is also a GeForce DDR board. I selected the DDR, but that does not work, despite the fact my card has DDR on the box. However, the GeForce 4 generic option does work, on the DVI-I port, at low resolution. Clearly there seems to be an issue with various manufacturers making cards slightly differently and only bothering to write drivers for Windoze. I can see this being a real hassle for everyone. I also have a Sun workstation at home, which costs a lot more (even used) for the same performance of a PC. However, I must say, everything I've ever put into my Sun (currently a dual 450 MHz processor Ultra 60 with 1280 Mb RAM), has worked first time. Every Sun I've owned is the same. Sun make the OS and the hardware. I only use the machine for home use, but can see why people like my sysadmin at work prefer to uses Sun servers and won't touch GNU/Linux. I'm not knocking Linux, but hardware compatability clearly seems to be an issue which will not go away. -- Dr. David Kirkby PhD, email: drkirkby@ntlworld.com web page: http://www.david-kirkby.co.uk Amateur radio callsign: G8WRB
