[P650] Xorg 7.4 and how to live with it

[petersem]

Dear Matrox-Users, dear Alexander,

it's been a long time since my last post, but let me assure You, that's because of the good work Alexander put up.

So my reason for being back alive is, of course, Xorg 7.4. I dist-upgrade'ed my box without taking a closer look and a new X i got. Since my desktop-/wm-envirement was also upgraded it took me a while to gather all pieces together to draw the correct conclusions - gettin' older has it's bad side.

I send a couple of more mails to Matrox, demanding new drivers, but I would like to ask You about the mean time:

Are there flags to be given to X to make it play niecer with this P650? I ('til this moment) miss at most the possibility to bring a Digital TV stream from a TV-card PVR350 from Hauppauge to fullscreen on my primary monitor, so if You (or you know some hints, I would be to gratefull.

I am already: Alexander, You have been a great source of info and drivers for my compunting expirience!! I still hold up these dual-head Matrox cards high, very good analog signal quality and the P650 fanless DualDVI in a professional package. But they would have gone into the bin a long time ago if it wasn't for Your drivers. So, thank You once more.

Greetings to You poor fellow Matrox users, Matrox is the new SGI, so we are indeed a weird crowd .

Martin

Riding with VESA from Xorg 7.4 with 2.6.29 - Debian GNU/Linux in the Sidux Package (http://www.sidux.org)
Matrox P650 AGP on i865G w. P4@2.8Ghz)

[schloeri]

I couldn't say it better.

Matrox informed me that there is a plan for a new driver in May ... 2009.

Let's keep our fingers crossed.

[petersem]

That would be great. I'm still using a mainboard with AGP and since I held on to Matrox for so long there are not much AGP-cards with reasonable price left.

So I'm looking ahead, smiling.

Kind regards to all readers,

Martin

[koslowj]

I couldn't say it better.

Matrox informed me that there is a plan for a new driver in May ... 2009.

Let's keep our fingers crossed.

For what its worth, I just got a reply from Matrox support to expect a new parhelia driver supporting xorg-server 1.5 in May/June. Let's keep our fingers crossed...

-- Jürgen

[tuxx-home.at]

So, now it's June instead of May? Hmm... history starts to repeat itself...

[hugo]

I got the information May 15th, 2009. That's tomorrow

[petersem]

Unfortunately they have not updated there website yet.

Where do You guys get Your informations from? I never got an answer using their support form.

You dug into their hrm or harvested their website?

I'd love to test the new drivers and it's perfect conditions in western germany, heavy rainfalls on a friday evening. Could You post the news if the new driver is in town?

Many thanks and much love,

Martin

[tuxx-home.at]

I have written a small script that download the driver download page two times a day and if it changes, I get an e-mail So i should know it almost immediately if something new is on their servers.

[koslowj]

I just saw a new 1.4.7 32 bit driver dated May 22 in Matrox' Parhelia section. Not sure, if this applies to other cards as well.

-- Juergen

[Squonk]

Hi @all,

looks like we all could keep our beloved Matrox cards

Here is a first test: On my system (Millenium P650 AGP, Mandriva 2009.0 x86, xorg 1.4.2, Kernel 2.6.27.21) OpenGL works again, can't believe it...
If weather isn't too good next days maybe I'll give a try to Mandriva 2009.1 with xorg 1.6

Greetings,
Christian

[Squonk]

from 'doc/readme-advanced.txt', line 594:

4 - Some OpenGL-based games and applications (for example, UT2003
and UT2004) may not work properly with this release and may
crash or cause image corruption.

...and yes, it's true. GoolgeEarth makes X crash after a few seconds.

As usual, the driver setup fails to create a usable xorg.conf. Be sure to
make a backup of your recent file if you want to give it a try.

The downloaded file is labeled 'matroxdriver-x86_32-cvs-20090511.bin'
So lets hope this is NOT the final release of 1.4.7

[Squonk]

Hi,

yesterday I updated my box from Mandriva 2009.0 to 2009.1. The new driver installs
fine with Kernel 2.6.29.3 and xorg 1.6.1. Adding 'vmalloc=256M' to the kernel boot
options solved the OpenGL problems. GoogleEarth works fine now, and I'm happy
again

Regards,
Christian

[petersem]

It's nice to be back in the mtx game .

The driver installed flawless with 2.6.29 kernel and gcc 4.3.3.
I'll tweak the xorg.conf this evening and I have high hopes that my box will be fully useable again.

Does somebody know about the state of a true open mtx driver or keeps Matrox it's specs closed?

Thanks for the info about the new driver.

Much love,

Martin

[tuxx-home.at]

I doubt there will be an open mtx driver. I haven't looked at the m9x driver yet, but I guess it's closed source too.