[hllug] Re: more woes on the video-go-round
- From: Lee Parmeter <geek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: hllug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 23:14:59 -0500
On 09/12/2009 07:41 PM, Don Crowder wrote:
My favorite video resolution is 1024 X 768 w/24 bit color. A few
years ago I figured out that any of the assorted flavors of nVidia
TNT2 cards supported my chosen resolution in all of the Linux distros
I was familiar with at the time so I stocked up on them (they were
very inexpensive on eBay) and that was fine for a while except it's
not any more.
A few years ago a friend gave me a stack of Dell GX115's. These
computers have onboard Intel video with about 4 megs of RAM (chipset
is 815E). The OS is supposed to assign system RAM to take up the
slack and Debian Etch did that just fine. I was able to get 1024 X
768 video on these machines with all the distributions I was familiar
with at the time.
Debian Lenny (and the entire *buntu family) run at 800 X 600 on the
Dell machines. That's the best they'll do. Swapping to the nVidia
TNT2 card doesn't help, in fact, I couldn't get X to start at all with
the TNT2 card, running Debian Lenny. (Yes, I ran dpkg-reconfigure
xserver-xorg from the CLI, no help).
The TNT2 cards are supported by the nVidia 71xx legacy driver which is
available in Etch but not in Lenny.
So, I can't get the onboard video to do any better than 800 X 600 and
my nVidia cards are useless. I've googled for a solution to this a
few dozen times over the last few months.
So, I've decided that I'm going to have to give up some bucks to buy
some video cards but my requirements haven't changed. I want 1024 X
768 video w/24 bit color and I don't give a rat's patoot what kind of
card it is as long as it's PCI (so it'll fit everywhere I'm liable to
need it), runs well in Linux and doesn't cost much. Suggestions?
I have had good luck with nVidia 8300, 8400, and 8600 series cards. You
can find PCI bus 8400GS cards on newegg.com for less than $40. There are
also some older nVidia 5200 series PCI cards available for the PCI bus
at about the same price.
-Lee.
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