On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 02:56:21PM -0600, Marc Aurele La France wrote: > On Tue, 27 Jul 2004, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: > > On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 08:16:32AM -0600, Marc Aurele La France wrote: > > > This is a system BIOS issue, a problem particularly common with Dell's > > > lobotomised BIOSes. And there's very little the driver can do about it. > > > Depending on your kernel, you _might_ be able to get past this point by > > > configuring it to use atyfb to drive the Rage Pro. > > > Would it be practical to teach XFree to let the user lie to it, and > > pretend to be the BIOS? I know it would be another config file (or > > extension), but this seems a fairly common problem. > > > Is the problem just that the BIOS won't tell X what it needs to know, > > or does it actively get in the way? > > Such things as video memory timing and the like are VERY adapter-specific, > making it quite unrealistic for the driver to perform adapter initialisation. > Thus the driver requires that the adapter be previously initialised or have a > BIOS available. This is simply a consequence of ATI's adapter design and > there's dick-all the driver can do about it. Ok. I wasn't sure whether the problem was that the card was ready to go but the BIOS neglected to tell the server something that the user could, or if the problem was that that card was uninitialized. > One could, I suppose, boot with the onboard adapter as primary, save its > initialised BIOS somewhere, and have int10 use that copy in the multihead > situation. But the code to do that (securely or not) just isn't there. Sure. > Your options, at this point, are to talk to Dell (dead end), give up on the > onboard adapter in multihead, replace your motherboard, or get a system that's > not so broken. Or, as I suggested above, atyfb _might_ come in handy for a > change. Someone else's options; I was just kibitzing. Some people actually *do* subscribe to this list. :-) Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra@xxxxxxxxxxx Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 "You know: I'm a fan of photosynthesis as much as the next guy, but if God merely wanted us to smell the flowers, he wouldn't have invented a 3GHz microprocessor and a 3D graphics board." -- Luke Girardi _______________________________________________ XFree86 mailing list XFree86@xxxxxxxxxxx http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
