Linux graphics card drivers?

[fluffymark]

Some fiddling around with BIOS settings and reshuffling of the PCI cards to avoid PCI slot 1 (which apparently conflicts with the AGP socket) and jellyfish now has a happy shiny working graphics card. Yaaaaaaay!

A few teething problems remain - firstly my ethernet card appears to refuse to be reattached, but that's no big problem as I don't currently need the thing. I mysteriously lost audio for a while too, but that seems to have reappeared now. More importantly, I'm lacking graphics drivers in linux for the new card. X is reverting to a generic driver allowing an appalling 320x200 screen resolution, which is unworkable. The card is a Sis 305 AGP - I'm hoping the latest Xfree86 has drivers for it and am considering the download, but it may be unfeasible over my slow modem. Eeeep. Any advice on downloading and installing graphics card drivers for linux would be much appreciated.

Comments

[zotz]

I've never heard of the resolution being limited on the generic X server. The standard SVGA should do any resolution you want.

[fluffymark]

Yes, I thought it was being silly. I'll have a look at XF86Config and see if i can hit it with a few things.

[zotz]

Ctrl/Alt/+ and Ctrl/Alt/- jump tthe resolution up and down. Or should. The starting display resolution is the first valid one listed in XF86Config.

[fluffymark]

First thing I tried, but fails - it seems to think that the only resolution is 320x200, 256 colour, despite what XF86Config says. It also claims there is only 64KB of video memory, when there is in fact 64MB, and 320x200x8bits just fits into that.

This appears to be only a problem with how X is configured. SVGALIB is happy displaying 640x480 screens in a few C++ things i've written, although my apricots game, which uses multiple double buffered screens now fails.

So I should be able to get X to give me higher resolutions even unger generic SVGA. Trying to configure using Xconfigurator fails, it can't recognise the primary graphics card (it finds itis there, but doesn't know what to do with it), and instead finds my old graphics card and configures X for that, which obviously fails.

I'm tempted to use this as an excuse upgrade my linux distribution, Redhat 6.1 is looking dated. May solve all my problems at once.

[olithered.livejournal.com]

Hello again.

Did you ever get this sorted? Upgrading the distribution may be a good plan - I have RH8.0 and RH9 CDs that you can borrow if you like. The "Xconfigurator" has been replaced by the vastly superior "redhat-config-xfree86". It was able to get me 800x600 on an old 2MB VLB graphics card in my 486 at home...

[fluffymark]

No it' not sorted yet, i've put it on the backburner for now, although it means my current setup is far from ideal as it requires me to change the BIOS settings each time i flip between Windows and Linux to get the monitor that works.

Yes, i'd love to borrow a more up to date version of Redhat - 9.0 would be nice (assuming theres no bizarre reason to prefer 8.0?) - i'm assuming this included the desired version of XFree86 (version 4.3.0) i need to attempt to get my graphics card working.

I'll be in Cambridge on saturday for strawberry fair. If you can arrange to get the CDs to me then, that would be great.

Thanks! :)