[aclug-L] Re: Voodoo & Linux 'OpenGL' 3D Graphics

[james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

> Video cards, DVD players and other computer equipment has changed a lot
> in the last 2 years.  There are several video cards that have their own
> fan, but most of the fans get very noisy and wear out within a year and
> then the chip has no cooling what so ever.  Most of the good video card
> have an elaborate convoluted heat sink that disapate the heat well and
> some have a fan on top of the heat sink, simular to cpu setups, but on a
> smaller scale.  It isn't necessary to have DVD hardware decoding in the
> video any longer, DVD drives which cost about $10-20 more than a regular
> CD-ROM, don't use the hardware decoding, but maybe by software.  Do they
> run on linux?  I don't know, that is about the only use that I have for
> the windoze machine any more, to play DVD movies and some of the windoze
> games, just for play and not to be taken seriously.  The real work is
> done by the 5 linux machines in my forever messy office.  ttyl ironrose
> 

There are supposed to be several DVD software players for linux (aka decss and 
an mpeg-2 player) I personally haven't tried them, but oms (livid) or mplayer 
should work just fine. (btw, mplayer's latest now supports video capturing (ala 
v4l) to several codecs. I plan on trying this tonight or later this week.
Now instead of a libdecss or libcss, there is supposed to be a libdvd that most 
of the dvd players are using.
As far as I knew, Creative's DVD hardware decoders were the only hardware 
decoder boards that worked. (opensource.creative.com I think)

James L.


> David Carmichael wrote:
> > 
> > > Actually I am not for sure. I never really got into fancy 3D
> > > video cards much. I am not a gamer. I don't even run X on my
> > > Debian box and RedHat works fine with the Matrox card. But I
> > > did a quick look at google.com/linux and came across this:
> > > http://www.linuxlookup.com/html/guides/3dfx.html it may be
> > > of some help, I think linuxgames.com has some linux/3D info,
> > > also check out the XFree86.org site. Its not really so much
> > > the distro as which version of XFree86 it comes with. Full
> > > support "right out of the box" for fancy cards is pretty
> > > rare but with some reading and a little work you should be
> > > able to get it working.
> > >
> > > I just looked at linuxgames.com and it talks on the front
> > > page about the Voodoo cards.
> > >
> > 

On your voodoo 2, I don't have a v2 (v3) but in some of the docs I came across 
said a banshee used the same drivers as the voodoo2, but the 3 used it's own 
seperate, and the v4/5 have their own. (mind you most of this was for X 3.3.x, 
I think XF 4.x.x should work, try Xconfigurator's (or distro's equivelent, 
someone care to fill in debian's equivelent?) settings first.)

> >  Randy -
> > 
> > I would not call the Voodoo-2 a fancy video card... it is now close to
> > three-to-five years old.. some of the newer video cards are what I would
> > call fancy! They get so hot and run so fast that they need their own cooling
> > fans.. The ATI-Radeon<PCI> that I picked up a few weeks ago even has its own
> > cooling fan and the card is basically two years old! The newer versions are
> > two head, dual monitor, multi-plane, DVD hardware decoding, ect...
> > 
> > The good side of most of these newer cards are they come with Linux
> > 3D/OpenGL drivers (and support) out of the box......
> > 

3dfx (voodoo series), matrox(g200, g4xx), ati(radeon), and 
nvidea(sp?)(tnt1/2,geforce1/2/3) all have drivers, but nvidea's are partly 
closed source and you have to go to their website to download them.

> > 'Oh' why I started to reply in the first place was.. I have been trying for
> > a number of hours to reach the web site 'Linuxlookup' from your link and
> > keep getting DNS errors, did a trace route and it has been failing on me
> > some place out west...
> > 
> > --David
> > 
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