AMD64 Xorg Help Needed

[sam williams]

Looks like I might have read the manpage a little fast, but it really
doesn't matter I guess. First, of all thanks for everyone who took the
time to respond to my initial plea  for help.

I have a work related deliverable that required two graphics cards.
One with digital output to drive a 37" sharp 1377x768 monitor, and a
another card with quad output to drive 4 21" Samsung LCD displays. I
have always been able to drive the 4 monitors without question under
Fedora Core 2, although one mail response I got early in the week said
that isn't supported, so I felt ahead of the game at this point. Once
I add the second display adapter I have problems. My xorg.conf has
layouts defined for "single" which is the 37" Display, "Quad" which
handles the 4-head card, and "All" which combines single and quad
together.  Trying each layout, "quad" works properly, single has its
output show up on monitor0 from the quad card, and "all" only displays
on the quad.  Yes I do use the proper BusID's but that doesn't fix the
problem at all. For the record, one card is AGP and the other is PCI
based. This shouldn't cause problems. There is a possibility that the
apparent addressing problem could be an issue running multiple
graphics cards in the Tyan Thunder motherboard. No evidence or
information supporting this idea has been found.

The Quad card was initially the problem. I went though an Nvidia
Quadro Pro, the New Matrox Qid until I finally went to the junk box to
get an older card that would work. Singularly, I can get the 37"
monitor to work, but only as 800x600. You can imagine how big the
pixels really seem. My inquiry for the mga_hal module was based on the
belief that it would help me get the extra geometry that I need, not
the idea that it was being provided freely.... I was looking for
solutions to help demonstrate the viability of the concept. BTW, for
the record, this solution will be used by a couple of Fortune 25
companies to control multi-million dollar power systems labs  from one
side of the US to another.

After much trying and quite frankly drawing a blank through a number
of mailing lists, including Matrox, Tyan,  and Fedora Core 2, I've
been forced to give up the direction I was  heading. Making matters
worse is the idea that this machine, again an Opteron based box, has
been trying to upgrade xorg for sometime, but yum continiously reports
that there is an xorg-6.7.0-lib  dependency that isn't being
addressed.  Don't see this at all on the 32-bit FC2 boxes. I opened a
bugzilla report with Fedora over that and it was promptly closed by
someone who said run "yum upgrade" it will fix the problem.
Ironically,  the problem description specifically said that the error
was encountered when running "yum upgrade". Fedora has a need to
change this attitude if they are ever going to get community
acceptance like Debian. But no matter, I've been forced to de-install
Fedora Core 2, because I have a business deadline that requires this
equipment to be functional in the state I described within two weeks.
I'm currently running a 32-bit version of  Redhat 9 ( I guess there
was no 64-bit version), in the hopes that the mga_hal driver code I've
downloaded from Matrox will fix some or all of these issues. Should
know by Monday. Sadly, because of marketing pressure, if this doesn't
do it then there will be an installation of Windows XP on it and I
will get to hang my head in total shame and disgust.

So again, thank you gentleman for your feedback and suggestions. I
guess my attempts were a little too bleeding edge this time around..

- Sam


On Thu, 16 Sep 2004 14:09:33 -0400, Mike A. Harris
<mharris at www.linux.org.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
> sam williams wrote:
> > I have been running xorg.conf on an Opteron machine running Fedora
> > Core 2. I have a business need to get two graphics cards running. The
> > first card is agp based and will run a 37" LCD monitor from Sharp. The
> > second card is a 4 head card that is needed to run three displays.
> >
> > Currently, I'm having problems, I believe because the drivers that
> > come with the Fedora Core 2 distribution are incomplete. Both cards
> > are older Matrox. The only matrox driver I have is mga. I need
> > "mgag200 pci" and "mgag400".  A decent "mga_hal" wouldn't hurt either
> > since the 37" display is digital input only.
> >
> > The install is running Xorg 6.7.0. I have a couple of questions.
> > First, is there another source for these drivers for an Opteron based
> > machine. Second, if I downloaded and built 6.8.0, would I be able to
> > build the missing drivers? If the answer to the previous question is
> > yes, can I install over the top of the other xorg, or should I install
> > in a seperate location. Finally, does anyone have an experience
> > building 6.8.0 on Fedora Core 2?
> >
> > I would appreciate any and all answers to these questions. I should be
> > able to get both graphic cards working, since I can only use the
> > generic "mga" driver the X-server gets confused when I try to run both
> > at the same time. In fact, when the pci card is installed I can no
> > longer get a display on the 37" monitor. Instead it shows up on
> > Monitor 0 from the quad card.
> >
> > Thanks for any and all suggestions and hints....
> 
> As mentioned by two people (myself included) in your bug report, there
> is no such driver as "mgag200 pci" or "mgag400".  You read the manpage
> and either read it too fast, or just did not understand what it is
> saying very clearly.
> 
> Saying it one more time - there is NO other Matrox driver in existance
> except for the "mga" driver.  There are 2 of them.  One included with
> X.Org and XFree86, and one on the Matrox website also called "mga",
> which comes with proprietary hallib module also, which supports some
> more hardware than what the "mga" driver alone does.
> 
> The proprietary driver is not open source, and wont be included in
> the OS for that reason.
>