When you buy a video card, you are almost always supplied with a "windows driver" on disk, provided by the card manufacturer. This is standard practice because card manufacturers want to sell cards, and there are more than 220 million windows users out there. You folks who use another operating system pay for that windows driver because it is built into the price of the card as part of the development costs,
So we have Windows, which depends on manufacturers to write drivers, and Linux where projects write drivers for various cards, or more precisely X servers which adapt to cards. There are also a few commercial X Server packagers out there, like Accelerated-X, Metro, etc, which may cover some cards, laptops, and displays that the projects don't. The largest project I know of is XFree86, at www.XFree86.org. Some commercial servers are available from www.linuxmall.com, but tend to be spendy. Still, anyone who balks at paying for the driver for a video card had best realize he already HAS done so when he bought the card. It happens to be the wrong driver for Linux.
Finally, there are a few cards where manufacturer's non-disclosure agreements prevent XFree86 or similar projects who have open-source standards from obtaining the information necessary to write the driver. Red Hat wrote a driver for boards based on the Intel 740 AGP and made it available free, but only as a binary.
So, if you are having a lot of trouble with a particular video card, consider investing a few dollars in a supported card. I tinkered with XFree and its servers and its config files more than a few times and produced some good drivers for things that did not appear to work initially, but if you aren't ready to do that or don't have the time, buy a video card on the list. DON'T jump to another distribution. Some older RedHat, InfoMagic, and Caldera distributions included a version of the Metro-X server, but the cards covered were huge databases of older cards. Likely, you will not find your card supported if you did not find it at Mandrake. Or perhaps you will find it free at some other site, most of which have links at www.XFree86.org. The point is, the distribution makers are trying to put together what will give you a reasonable chance at a clean first-time install, but they do not generally write drivers for video cards, so there is not going to be much difference. That is, if your card didn't install and work under Mandrake, it probably won't under S.u.S.E., Pacific High-Tech, Caldera, or even BSD. Go to the source, to the XFree86 project to find the information you need.
Civileme
-- Civileme Say: "One who buys dual scan display soon gains Optometrist for best friend."
