> > > afford a better card or doesn't know what are graphics cards for.
> > > Well, no comments...
> >
> > Fine, you cannot afford a decent card. That is OK.
>
> That he can't afford a decent video card is OK. That the GGI people
To cut off the "affort, can't afford" issue - I've got a Matrox Millenium with
4MB ;-))))) But I still think that support for older cards is a must - as long
as they are on the market. Unless Alan wants Linux to suffer from the M$
Winblows syndrome - no support for the older hardware - MAKE EVERYONE BUY THE
LATEST STUFF NO MATTER WHETHER YOU USE ALL FEATURES OF YOUR OLD HARDWARE...
> essentially told him to go to hell when he offered to write a driver for it
> is not.
And that was my original point and that's when I started to be biased against
GGI PROJECT (!)
> > On most cards, VESA is provided by a DOS TSR. Do you really
> > want to put DOSEMU in the kernel?
>
> The DOS TSR is (as I understand it, and I gained an appreciation of VESA a
> long time ago) for older cards that didn't provide the VESA INT 10h
> functions themselves. With the TSR, you could use the generic VESA driver
> in absence of a true driver for your card. Other, newer cards that support
> VESA natively and for which the company won't provide specifications would
> benefit from having some kind of VESA support. (This being said, I seem to
That's exactly what it was for. The SciTech excellent UniVBE (now Display
Doctor) made many older cards run like charm with full support for VESA VBE
2.0. I don't vote for VESA interrupt interface support on Linux, but rather
for implementation of the VESA structures, modes, APIs in the Linux kernel -
that way porting games or whatever uses VESA from DOS to Linux would be a
matter of creating a portable library that hides the internal implementation
details before the developer.
> remember the GGI people saying something about VBE support...)
I heard that too, although I haven't seen any code.
> > We have an X server that disables interrupts. That should make
> > you scream. (hints: user-space, swapping, SMP...)
>
> <rant>X makes me scream anyway. It shouldn't take the better part of a
> second to unmap every window on my screen and just draw the frames (if not
> the whole content) on a Cyrix P166+ with a relatively decent video card,
> for which Winbloze can do almost instantaneous window reorganizations.
> </rant>
That's a different story, the X efficiency.
> All this being said, I know one of the main GGI developers rather well. In
> fact, his proselytizing is what provoked me to upgrade to 2.1.88 - so I
> could try out GGI (which I haven't, yet).
Pleas don't understand me wrong: I don't want to offend anyone, I'm just
saying that I had such a PRIVATE conversation with one of the GGI team and I
heard what I heard. I wish them very well but just hope they'll get more open
and amiable...
> ObSVGAlibHorrorStory: I've had four different video cards in this machine.
> SVGAlib caused total system lockups with the first three[1], and doesn't
> even work[2] with my current card, S3 ViRGE[3].
What's true is true... SVGAlib, as popular as it is, isn't a paritcularily
stable piece of software. ;-((
later, marek
---
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened
of the old ones.
John Cage
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