[3498] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Getting X to work on Dell Lattitude C840 needs X server
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Mon Sep 16 15:55:28 2002
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: Oliver Thomas <othomas@mit.edu>
Cc: release-team@mit.edu, owls@mit.edu, kathleen@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <9CA2D72A-C9A8-11D6-8884-000393A3632A@mit.edu>
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Date: 16 Sep 2002 15:55:26 -0400
Message-Id: <1032206126.9076.49.camel@tokata.mit.edu>
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I now have a better understanding of how the tags in the XFree86 source
tree work.
Support for the NVIDIA GeForce 2 that the old C820 has, and the GeForce
4 that the new C820 has are tagged with the name "xf_4_2_99" which
basically means that they will be the things that get integrated into
version 4.3 when it eventually comes out.
As a pretty strongly entrenched rule, Athena does not fetch binary-only
custom X servers off the net, nor does it build custom X servers from
source. This is because we're trying not to invest a lot of
hand-tooling to support non-mainstream stuff. We try to minimize the
number of hacks beyond what stock Red Hat ships.
Garry and I very carefully went over this model with IBM, and HP when we
talked to them about how we do Athena Linux, and what our requirements
are. I've repeatedly gone over this model with the Dell folks, but it's
unclear if ever we'll come to a workable agreement here, for desktop or
laptop support of Linux from Dell.
Side note: Andrew looked at the binary-only driver for the Matrox
hardware on the IBM Desktop systems as part of investigation into
problems we were having. The proprietary driver from Matrox had
different behavior, and in several cases behaved WORSE than XFree86 did!
We saved a gate. Re-architect all your software, Ok?
-- Anonymous Hardware Engineer
We can't tell you our API. It would reveal to our competitors
what we now know how to do!
-- Anonymous Video Chipset Engineer.
Bottom line:
I think we need to mark the Dell C840 as, "Does not run Athena linux.
Requires either a proprietary video driver, or building X from source."
-wdc
On Mon, 2002-09-16 at 15:15, Oliver Thomas wrote:
> Not sure if this is relevant, but I'm pretty sure I ran RedHat/XFree86
> successfully more than six months ago on a Dell Inspiron 8100 with a
> GeForce2go card and a UXGA display using drivers/rpms downloaded
> directly from Nvidia. The Nvidia drivers required XFree 4.0.1 or higher
> at the time.
>
> Am I missing something here? Is this about getting the installer to
> work and not about getting X to work in general?
>
> Oliver
>
