Lazy day

[altivo]

I had the whole day off, which is nice coming after a Wednesday, but even better because after tomorrow I'll have nine solid days off. I'm eating up those leftover vacation days before the deadline.

So I puttered and read and messed around. Did clean the barns, did take Tess out to the pasture for a while, and did plant some seeds to get them started for the garden: tomatoes of various sorts, hot and sweet peppers, and some eggplants, which never do well but I'm perpetually hopeful.

There was a forecast of thunderstorms in the afternoon, which later were pushed off into the evening and now are down to a 60% chance of thunderstorms after 1 am tomorrow. The radar looks like they missed us completely and went off into central Wisconsin.

Swapped out the S3 Trio 64 video card in the Alpha to try an ELSA Gloria L/MX that I found. Thought it might work with Linux, which the S3 Trio doesn't do. Well, the ELSA doesn't work with Linux either, and doesn't work with VMS. This irritated me so I started experimenting.

These are older cards, and jolly well ought to have support. It turns out that the L/MX has an S3 ViRGE chip in it, which at least is supposed to be supported. Since Xorg replaced XFree86, it seems that X documentation and support has gone down the toilet. I started backing down versions of X. When I reached XFree86 version 3.3 the card started working properly. It may work in XFree 4 as well, since I never got that one fully installed. In Xorg 7.1 it doesn't work at all. The same is true for the S3 Trio 64, though now I need to swap cards again and see if that one also works in older versions of XFree86. I'm betting it does. So what's the excuse for breaking hardware drivers that used to work just fine? Just the "Oh, no one uses those old cards any more" excuse. Pretty lame. It turns out that lots of people use them if they are running older hardware, for lots of good reasons. The only cards that work with OpenVMS are old ones. And, unfortunately, the few that are compatible with both OpenVMS and Linux now have absurdly high prices. (Asking as high as $800 for a video card that was old in Y2K is just silly.)

Comments

[schnee.livejournal.com]

According to http://www.x.org/wiki/Projects/Drivers , there's supposed to be a driver for the Virge for newer X.org releases, too... but who knows whether it's been subject to bitrot.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

There is a driver. It doesn't work. There is also a driver for the original S3 chip series. That one doesn't work either. Somewhere along the line, someone ported code without being able to test it I think. They probably had no access to the actual hardware. So it was one of those "I think it will work" jobs, only it doesn't.

This is pretty frustrating, but the attitude I got when I tried to report the problem was "So what? No one uses those any more." Trouble is, when you run on hardware other than Intel Pentium, you may have no choice but to use some of these things.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK.

Hmm, did they really say that? That's a very unprofessional attitude to say the least, much more so for a high-profile project like X.org, and it reflects very badly on any project that actually aims to support more than modern x86 boxen running Linux.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, I was going through the Alpha developers' list, not direct to X.org. On the other hoof, though, if you go look at the X.org wiki, or the Linux man files, they have completely dropped the S3 generic driver from the docs. Makes it very difficult to report it as a problem when there is no documentation of what it does or doesn't support, right? The driver still comes with the distribution, but is completely undocumented. The S3 ViRGE driver is documented, but incompletely. The Xorg command, which is supposed to probe cards and identify them, fails to recognize the S3 ViRGE chip on this one, though the old XFree86 utilities do see it just fine.

There are other issues with the ViRGE, the largest of which is that it is unsupported in OpenVMS, and I really want a card that works in both places. The Trio 64 is the best candidate, because it does work well in OpenVMS, but unfortunately it seems to be abandoned and broken in Linux. So far the PCI video card I've tried that works best in Linux is the Matrox Millennium, but that too is completely non-functional in OpenVMS.

Ironic that the Matrox cards should work so well now. Back when the Millennium was new, Matrox was very proprietary about it and refused to give the necessary information to Linux folks for them to get a driver going. I guess after a couple of years they changed their mind.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

*noddles* May be...