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jvax
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2006 4:24 pm    Post subject: video card question [SOLVED] Reply with quote

I have a Blade 100 with ati onboard and was wondering, what's the best 3D video card supported so far by gentoo/xorg?
Can I use a regular PCI video card (geforce/radeon/etc...)? Are there any restictions wrt sun hardware, OpenBoot or smth else...?


Last edited by jvax on Thu Dec 07, 2006 6:17 am; edited 1 time in total
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swooshOnLn
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2006 4:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You mean AGP? (PCI Video Cards are old and outdated, PCI express is another story though). I would personally go with Nvidia, it seems they have the best all-around linux support (they dont have closed source drivers, like ATI). I myself have a Radeon card and have no problem with it (running DRI). However, I dont game really at all, and don't really need any fancy bells and whistles that somebody might be looking for.

It all really depends on what you want to do with your system.
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Gentoo Bob
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2006 4:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Go with Nvidia, there so much more support available with Nvidia and their drivers than with ATI. You may have 3-D issues with ATI, especially the newer cards. Nvidia supports Linux just as much as Windows anymore.
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gust4voz
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2006 6:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ok people, please don't post if you don't have a clue of what you're talking about and don't even care to do a basic google search.
He's not talking of X86/AMD64-land, this is SPARC-land and things are quite different.
The blade 100 has a regular PCI bus, not PCIe since it's an old machine.
Nvidia is highly unlikely to work on a sparc so if he bought one on your advice it'll probably be quite useless for a blade 100.
That being said not any PCI video card will work and OBP won't claim any video card that's not supported (meaning most unless it's a sun-made one with it's own openboot firmware).
I think weeve had some success on using Sun-labeled Radeons on his (XVR-100 or so), but don't take my word on it and wait for his comment.
Personally i'm using a Matrox Millenium2 but 3D-wise it's meaningless, though better than the onboard - theory says up to G200 should work.
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2006 6:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Check out http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/sparc/hwlist.xml for some non-Sun supported hardware.

You are out of luck with any recent ATI/NVidia board. I've tested some PCI Radeon 9xxx in my Blade 1000 and it was no go, card was not even detected by OBP nor shown via lspci.
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gust4voz
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2006 6:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Oh on a side note some video cards (like the matrox) can be used even though OBP doesn't know anything about them, but they'll just kick in once linux boots.
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jvax
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 1:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks guys. I guess there is not much choice then. I think I'll stick with the onboard ati.
After all, a while ago, I did get X with gnome working on it under 1680x1050x60 for my Dell 2005FPW, using FreeBSD though. And boy was that a beautiful thing to see!!
I'll try the same config once I get gentoo up'n'running and I'll post some feedback.
Again, thanks for the tips.
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 2:18 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi,
I am stuck trying to figure out how to get X 7.1.1 to work on my Blade 100.
I added VIDEO_CARDS="ati" prior to emerge xorg-x11, then used xorgcfg -textmode to generate a xorg.conf with Driver "ati", but when I try to test X, it fails loading module "ati" complaining that it does not exist... Same error when I changed ati to mach64...
I am running kernel 2.6.17r8 and here is my xorg.conf and Xorg.0.log.
Anyone, can help please.
Thanks
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 6:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I solved it. All I had to do was emerge x11-drivers/xf86-drivers-ati and it all worked.
I'll post my updated xorg.conf later.
Now I'm on to KDE, which is close to finishing.

Cheers
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