[clug] Video Cards for Linux

[Ian Petts]

I picked up a second hand PIII at one of the computer fairs a few months
ago, to replace my aging PII.

I've stuck DVD-ROM in it that I had lying around and set about trying to
watch an R1 DVD I got from Amazon a while back (I don't have a DVD player
as such, just a [strictly R4] PS2).

The thing was kinda' watchable, but somewhat jerky and dropped a lot of
frames. I didn't think much more of it.

Then, a week or two ago a friend of mine sent me an Intel 7xx
(something-or-other, not near it at the moment) card that I stuck in, and
lo and behold, the DVD played just great; no noticeable dropped frames, no
lip-sync problems, too cool. I noticed later though that X was running
REALLY slowly. Moving windows around seemed to be a problem for this card,
and even scrolling text in my browser, I could literally see the refresh
moving down the screen.

So it seems that the Intel whatever card is a dog for running X.

I have scoured the net, Googled for ages, but can't seem to find any
recommendations for decent video cards under Linux. I don't play games
much, and only really want something that will let me use X at a
reasonable speed and use mplayer (or Xine, or anything) to watch the DVDs.
I've read on the mplayer site that they flatly refuse to even talk to
people with nVidia cards, so I guess they're out :) I'm running Fedora
Core 1 on this box, btw.

Can someone please recommend a good, reasonably priced card, preferably
under about $100, for use with Linux? A pointer as to where I might find
one locally would also be helpful.

Thanks,
Ian.

-- 
My horse got shot, so I had to break his leg