i810 rehash and dell inspiron 2600

[Jim Cornette]

Justin Georgeson wrote:
> As an interesting note, Dell Inspiron 2600 laptops must stay at BIOS 
> revision A08 or lower or this chipset will not work at all in any Linux 
> distribution.
> 
> What are the differences between the xorg i810 driver (is the upstream 
> fixed one in the FC3 xorg 6.8.0 packages?) and the Intel one? The latest 
> version from Intel was released in June of this year and the README 
> tells how to configure dual-head support. Has anyone installed it (I 
> haven't been able to build it so far on FC3T2 or Suse 9.1)?
> 

With a Dell computer that has an 828 656 Graphics controller, the driver 
has changes that make the server solid vs. previous version of X. The 
pre-CVS versions would totally crash X and leave whatever visual 
representations were on the display present. X itself would not be in 
the process list. I seem to recall that this GC identifies itself as an 
845 GC. I did a search for the specs for your laptop. It came back with 
information that it uses the 830 chipset. Therefore, if it acts like the 
845, it should work better with the CVS version. If it acts more like 
the 815, you are out of luck.

Regarding dual head support. I tried this for the 815 GC and had a bit 
of trouble. This was with another troubled video card, so the results 
were pretty useless. (Lockups and other things)

As a note on BIOS for the Dell, I had to upgrade BIOS from A03 to A04.

I have not tried the Intel driver version. Is this more capable than the 
xorg-x11 version? Any different features besides dual-head?

Jim