Re: [SLUG] Banshee card and xfree86 4.0.3

From: Paul M Foster (paulf@quillandmouse.com)
Date: Mon Apr 30 2001 - 23:52:36 EDT


On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 07:32:09PM -0400, Glen Canaday wrote:

> Sounds like you are using the framebuffer driver in the kernel. This is bad,
> as those things tend to get flakey with X and vice versa. When X is running,
> it'll screw up the console display and sometimes they won't fix after X is
> killed. I follow Paul Foster's credo concerning framebuffer drivers: don't
> use them.

I haven't checked out a framebuffer server in a year or two. My
experience at the time was that it was buggy and didn't take advantage
of the standard character set available on all PCs and monitors. That
made it slower, and it required adjustment not normally necessary on
PCs. Has that changed in the last couple of years? I dunno, since I
haven't looked.

And just for the record, my main machines (not the servers) are Pentium
133/166's, with 32 or 48 meg of memory and Diamond Stealth 2000 cards.
No sound cards, since I don't like my computer doing anything but
beeping at me. They play a passable game of Quake or Quake II, and do
anything else I need. (The servers don't have enough memory or strong
enough video cards to run even a passable X server.)

Some day, I'll upgrade. But as long as my hardware does what I need, I
don't really care to spend the money. Besides, I spend plenty enough
regularly upgrading my wife's machines so she can run Windows software.

Point here is that while a really current machine can make Linux sing,
you can get an awful lot of actual work done on a machine that's a
couple of generations back. As for servers, even 486's are more than
adequate in most cases.

Linux is a beautiful thing.

Paul



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