Just crap

The Matrox G550 dual head video card arrived on schedule yesterday and I swapped it out with the Radeon last night. Downloaded the DRI Project’s latest CVS source of XFree86, configed it to build drivers for Matrox cards, made it and installed it over my 4.3.0.2 install. Started X and it came up just fine in 1280x1024x24bpp showing a clone of the main screen on the secondary port. Used the desktop configuration tool to use xcinerama mode across two heads. Restarted X and… Well back to the same problem as with the Radeon card, showing half of a large desktop on one display and the other display switching into protection mode.

I’m starting to think that it’s not an X problem or a driver problem, but a fundamental issue with linux’s motherboard drivers. The machine is a high performance unit built around the Intel i875p chipset. It seems that the agpgart kernel module that FC1 uses does not support this chipset. I’ve looked around and I can’t find out if support will be included in this module in the future. This wouldn’t be a problem if hardware designers would just release drivers to their products for linux, either in binary or preferable source form.

I’ll keep looking around browsing through mailing list archives and forums for ideals and suggestions. I might even put FCt2 on my old Athlon machine and put this G550 into it and see if I can get dual heads working on that, but I would hate to have to use that old box. I can’t see myself moving from my 3.2Ghz P4 down to a 2400+ Athlon just to use a large desktop on two displays. I might just have to get used to using one display again.