[clug] XFree 4 and Compaq badged S3 Virge GX fun

[Paul Hampson]

On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 03:02:08PM +1100, Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au wrote:
> I recently rebuilt a Compaq Deskpro 4000 for someone and had
> all sorts of grief getting the video working under X.
> 
> The easy part was identifying the "Compaq" video card by peeling off
> a bar-code to reveal the S3 logo and chipset number (also, the Compaq
> NIC is a re-badged TLAN).
> 
> Even so, the XFree4 (4.1) S3 Virge driver "s3virge" seems to suck . I got
> colours and an intelligible display by switching off just about every
> card feature. But with everything switched off, I still got flickering
> and pixel corruption (especially when moving windows).
> 
> When I ran out of things to switch off, I used the vesa driver instead.
> This works well, but is presumably not as nice as using a specific driver.
> 
> Is this normal for the S3 Virge? Or a feature of the Compaq implementation?

I also had similar problems with an S3 Virge and a similar aged driver
(around 2001~2002) and ended up with the Vesa driver. Since it was a
headless fileserver/gateway, I never worried about it, and never found
out if more recent XF86 showed any improvement.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------
Paul "TBBle" Hampson, MCSE
7th year CompSci/Asian Studies student, ANU
The Boss, Bubblesworth Pty Ltd (ABN: 51 095 284 361)
Paul.Hampson at Anu.edu.au

"No survivors? Then where do the stories come from I wonder?"
-- Capt. Jack Sparrow, "Pirates of the Caribbean"

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