Re: 2 cards and a dilemma

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu wrote:
 
 <snip>

> The box they're offering me is a Gateway E-4200.
> 
> Which seemed great, until I searched the debian-user archive, to head
> off any hardware issues that might arise, and found (from a
> conversation involving Kent West and others) that this box contains a
> network card (3Com 905c) whose support is iffy (a driver exists but
> has not been included in the kernel as of 2.2.12 at least) and a
> graphics card (ATI Rage 128 AGP) which is not supported as of the
> 3.3.4 release of XFree86.

  <snip>

> The graphics card seems more problematical though. The options seem to
> be:
> 
>   . wait until some upcoming release of XFree86 (3.3.6, 4?) includes
>     support for the card and use console mode in the meantime
>   . pay $100 for a commercial X server like Accelerated X
>   . magically learn that there is now someone on this list who knows
>     how to get the card to run under a currently available version of
>     XFree86

  <snip>

> Jim

I did finally get the Rage128 card to work with the FBDEv (Frame
Buffer Device) method. I haven't had enough experience with
GNU/Linux to be able to tell you if it's running slow or fast or
as expected, or what types of glitches may be associated with
this. I am having trouble with my keyboard, but that's *probably*
not related to the Rage128 card, but thought I'd mention it in
case it is related.

I'm also getting a checkksum error on the 3com905c card, but it
doesn't seem to be affecting anything; in an earlier post I had
mentioned that the network "felt" slow to me, but after talking
to my colleagues (all techies), they said they had noticed the
slowdown too, so it's not related to my machine in particular, so
that's a non-issue.

Kent West