Re: PC graphic adapters on Mac Harware
On 2 Aug 2003 at 19:54, Simon Vallet wrote:
> On 02 Aug 2003 16:11:52 +0200
> Michel Dänzer <daenzer@debian.org> wrote:
> > Not hardware per se, but the firmware is a problem. IIRC only the tdfx
> > driver(s) can initialize a card from the ground up, for others you
> > should pick a 'Mac' card. Do you have any particular card(s) in mind?
>
> I was thinking about ATI, as I have some experience with those cards,
> but if there is a "better" (or cheaper ;) choice, why not ?
>
> If I got it right, I may be able to get a working tdfx card (what is the
> chipset -- tdfx ?), even if it is a PC-BIOS enabled card, but I'll have to
> choose a Mac-specific card otherwise (which is perfectly fine for me, as long
> as I know why -- and now I think I do) ?
You want a Mac-specific card because otherwise, the system will not
recognise the card as a graphics device, will not initialise the
card, and you will not see anything on the screen until Linux
(hopefully) initialises the card. I don't know if beige G3's have
OpenFirmware, in which case you might still get into the system's
boot prompt through a serial connection. If you keep using the
original graphics device alongside the new add-on card or instead of
it, this won't be a problem: Linux will recognise the card by its PCI
vendor:device string, so you can still bring up X.
Jeroen Roovers
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