What's a good video card?

Lin Tse Hsu evfreek at yahoo.com
Wed Feb 16 07:19:17 UTC 2005


Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 14:29:11 -0800
From: Rick Stevens <rstevens at vitalstream.com>
Subject: Re: What's a good video card?
To: For users of Fedora Core releases
<fedora-list at redhat.com>
Message-ID: <42112637.9050608 at vitalstream.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii;
format=flowed

Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
> Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> >> For a lot of people, video cards will have
improved enough in that 
time
>> frame, that they will just buy a new card.
> > > You mean for people that play games (mostly
under Windows) and need 
to 
> buy latest and greatest every one or two years?  For
the rest of us, 
I 
> don't see any reason why we would fork $100 every
couple of years for 
> new video cards, when the old ones work just fine
(and more than fast 
> enough, thanks for asking).

Then stop upgrading the kernel.  M$ doesn't update
their kernel as 
often
as Linux does so ancient Windows drivers on old
hardware stick around
longer.  I've even heard people buy new hardware, then
whine because
the maker doesn't provide a driver for Winblows 3.11! 
IMHO, Windows
drivers have an artificially long lifespan due to M$
not fixing things
that are known to be broken.  Linux is more fluid
because the kernel
gang never stops tweaking things in an effort to make
things better,
faster, more reliable, etc., etc.

If you don't like the lifespan, then freeze your
kernel at some level
where you know support exists for your hardware and
get on with your
life.  I've had to freeze kernels because of some
software issues with
new kernels and because the apps couldn't be updated. 
Yes, those
machines lag farther and farther behind, but they're
stable and they
work.  Do I want to update them?  You betcha!  Can I? 
No.  

------------------------------------------

This is very annoying.  But, the general attitude
among the developers is that old cards should be
obsoleted because "nobody is using them anymore." 
This causes some unpleasant side effects such as
thinking that non-working software is the cause of
problems and not broken hardware.

I fell for this trap, partially courtesy of this list.
 Somebody who probably did not know any better
criticized me for using "antique" video cards, and
that is why my X server was unstable.  After going
through about 7 video cards over several weeks of
mind-numbing wasted install time, it finally dawned on
me that this "antique" card crap was probably an
uninformed pat answer.  I reinstalled with RedHat 7.2
and duplicated the instability.  Memtest worked great,
so it was probably a failure in the video subsystem or
bus.  AGP and PCI cards both failed.  I purchased a
new motherboard, and the very first card (which had
failed with the old system) worked just fine.  So much
for the obsolete driver theory.

And as for freezing the kernel, this is also a pat
answer, and a somewhat uninformed one at that.  The
USB support is horrible on RedHat 7.2.  It works much
better on Fedora Core 3.  Sometimes you have to
upgrade, but the pat answer is fine if you only surf
web.



		
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