On Thu, Jan 11, 2001 at 09:06:43AM -0800, David Freeman wrote:
Which Distro would people recommend for ease of install and maintainance, also are there any which install the bttv driver as default?
The bttv driver is part of the standard kernel source distribution so I would be surpised to find it missing from any major distribution. I would also expect that most distributions would have it as a loadable module rather than permanently linked into the kernel.
....
Can I drive the old matrox mystique with the new Geforce at the same time in the same PC?
Probably.
X is unlikely to have a problem with this but there may be a catch or two. As you probably know there are several different X display servers in XFree86 and which you use depends on the chipsets.
If the GeForce card requires different X server from the Mystique then you'll have to run one copy of each and the problem then will be how to share the mouse and keyboard because in X terms you have two different displays (an X display comprises a screen, mouse and keyboard).
If they use the same X server then you may be able to configure it so that there are two screens but only one display and the mouse and keyboard will then work with eithers screen.
The other problem is that one of the cards has to be told not to implement the standard VGA text mode but to only come to life when it is switches to frame buffer mode. The VGA text mode uses a specific part of the address space so if two cards competer for it there will be trouble.
Another possibility is to make the Mystique the system console, enable the kernel framebuffer drivver and then use fbtv to watch TV rather than an X based client.
Steve.