Re: Requesting experiences with dual-DVI cards

["Mike A. Harris" <mharris www linux org uk>]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2004, William D. Hamblen wrote:

>I'd like to try and stay stock RHEL if I can and still have dual
>DVI.  I'll be ordering card(s) in the next day or so.  Offline,
>someone suggested the Matrox P650 for dual DVI; I'm still
>waiting to hear if he's using the open source driver or one from
>Matrox (not that I care very much, but my opinion of Matrox's
>binary drivers for the G550 is pretty low and it is definitely
>affecting my opinion of everything they do).

I very much don't recommend using Matrox Pxxx for Linux usage as
it is totally unsupported by RHEL3 and XFree86.  The last Matrox
card supported by open source drivers is the G550, and the driver
is more or less abandoned upstream nowadays.  Your entire OS 
would be unsupported if you were using proprietary drivers also 
(for any hardware).

RHEL 3's driver support will remain XFree86 4.3.0 indefinitely.  
Any changes I can make to the driver to improve stability and fix 
bugs over time will go into the 4.3.0 updates for RHEL 3.  Any 
_small_ and _isolated_ features that can be directly tested by me 
personally, and not regress the driver have a chance of going in 
also, but not any time in the near term.

I will not ever make major changes to the drivers in RHEL 3 which 
may jeopardize stability however.  RHEL 3 is not supposed to 
change in large ways.


-- 
Mike A. Harris