Comments on: Desktop with Dual-DVI

By: directhex

directhex — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 11:13:11 +0000

Matrox are anything but Open Source these days – anything manufactured in the past few years only works with an i386-only, old-version-of-XFree86-and-kernel binary driver. You can try and track down an old (G550 or before) card if you like, but expect to pay dearly for what’s essentially a massively underpowered piece of silicon

By: Perry Lorier

Perry Lorier — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 10:01:28 +0000

I tried the same thing 2 years ago, and I also wanted an open source driver. So uh, yeah that wasn’t gonna happen in a hurry. I ended up running in DVI/VGA as I couldn’t find any DVI/DVI cards that met my requirements. My second monitor is annoyingly shimmery at times, however the auto seems to fix that. I was eyeing up matrox’s trihead card the other day. I used to have a matrox card that worked well with open source drivers.

By: directhex

directhex — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 09:06:16 +0000

I’ve got to agree with Mike here – why stick with the known-bad entity? ATI’s closed drivers are largely a joke, and their “open” approach to drivers was some NDA’d documentation given to a couple of xfree developers a few years ago – hardly any kind of bastion of Freeness. Given there’s no 3D support in anything remotely as new as the X or X1-series cards with Open drivers, you’d have lost nothing by going for 3d-unaccelerated Open nvidia, and gained an awful lot with their high-quality closed driver

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 08:44:31 +0000

Matt, why the insistence on an ATI card? I’ve sworn off ATI for their horrible linux support, especially when compared against nvidia’s great, although nonfree, support. Setting up twinview/xinerama on my 7800gt was simple; certainly much easier than the run-around you had to accomplish here.