Having Just ordered a hardware upgrade for my aging 200mhz K2, I was thinking I might treat my self to a decent graphics card at the same time. So I have a couple of questions.
Which Distro would people recommend for ease of install and maintainance, also are there any which install the bttv driver as default?
Is the GeForce 2 chipset supported under linux?
What are there in the way of Linux games available?
Can I drive the old matrox mystique with the new Geforce at the same time in the same PC?
Thanks
D
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On Thu, 11 Jan 2001, 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?
I think SuSE has the bttv driver as a module but then most distro's will. I prefer Debian as although some people claim it is harder to install than most other distro's, but I found it to be the easiest to get things working with.
Is the GeForce 2 chipset supported under linux?
My GeForce GTS 2 is fine although I did have problems getting 3d DRI working, and have since broke it again.
What are there in the way of Linux games available?
Quake III nuff said although you should look at www.lokigames.com as they have a very good selection.
Can I drive the old matrox mystique with the new Geforce at the same time in the same PC?
If it is a PCI card then maybe yes, but I think you will have to buy an X-server that would work with this although it may work in windows. (I may be completly wrong with these comments though)
Adam
On Thu, 11 Jan 2001, David Freeman wrote:
Having Just ordered a hardware upgrade for my aging 200mhz K2, I was thinking I might treat my self to a decent graphics card at the same time. So I have a couple of questions.
Which Distro would people recommend for ease of install and maintainance, also are there any which install the bttv driver as default?
I'm just about to make the switch to Debian, so if you are looking to try a distro based on this check out Storm - it has a less complex install than the raw Debian, but is pretty true to its roots. I haven't tried it yet, but apt-get is supposed to be a very nice means of installing updates.
Is the GeForce 2 chipset supported under linux?
What are there in the way of Linux games available?
Check out http://www.lokigames.com/
Can I drive the old matrox mystique with the new Geforce at the same time in the same PC?
Assuming that you can run the GeForce chipset (not sure, haven't used it myself) you can run two cards with Xfree86 - so long as you have a spare monitor ;-) I quite like the idea of running an old 14" screen to watch logs in when I am developing code, but I don't have the space for the extra screen :-( I saw something on this only the other day, I just can't remember where... don't you just wish you could grep magazines sometimes!
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On Thu, 11 Jan 2001, Paul Tansom wrote:
I'm just about to make the switch to Debian, so if you are looking to try a distro based on this check out Storm - it has a less complex install than the raw Debian, but is pretty true to its roots. I haven't tried it yet, but apt-get is supposed to be a very nice means of installing updates.
I have tried Storm and the main thing that got me was the free version (non-retail) does not have as many packages as true Debian but you could add the Debian mirrors to your sources.list file.
Assuming that you can run the GeForce chipset (not sure, haven't used it myself) you can run two cards with Xfree86 - so long as you have a spare monitor ;-) I quite like the idea of running an old 14" screen to watch logs in when I am developing code, but I don't have the space for the extra screen :-( I saw something on this only the other day, I just can't remember where... don't you just wish you could grep magazines sometimes!
Now that is cool, I may have a look at that later on although finding space for a spare monitor will also be a problem for me :-(
A quick search on www.google.com with the terms "multiple screens with Xfree86 linux" returned some promising results.
Adam
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.
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Adam Bower -
David Freeman -
Paul Tansom -
Steven Fosdick