On Fri, 4 Jan 2002 10:50:18 -0800, Tom Manning wrote:
> I've been reading everything I can find on this card, and there's so
> much conflicting and outdated info out there I'm getting confused. I'm
> running Mandrake 8.1 on an older Pentium II, with a BX chipset.
>
> **I know some of these questions are newbie type questions, but if I
> fully understood the howtos and such I wouldn't ask, so please bare with
> me :-)**
>
> I'm considering buying a G450 for dualhead on my machine, but I want to
> know if I can hook up a 19" (primary) monitor and a 15" (satellite)
> monitor with few problems, at different resolutions. I've heard that
> matrox has antialiasing problems with their drivers though. Is that
> still true? Does anyone have specifics? Can I run it in Xinerama, with
> one big desktop, at different resolutions? Do I have to, or can I have
> two separate desktops running, just sacrificing the ability to move
> windows from one screen to the other?
You can easily do what you want.
Regarding antialiasing: there were some problems with Render
extension (which does antialiasing) in dualhead config, but they are fixed
now (don't remember exactly whether in XFree86 or in Matrox's driver).
Regarding one big desktop (Xinerama) in different resolutions:
this setup will work, but support in some window managers can be lacking.
In short: the problem is a presence of a "black hole" (see picture),
+----------+-----+
| | 800x|
| 1600x | 600 |
| 1200 |-----+
| | <-- "black hole"
+----------+
which isn't visible on any of the displays and isn't reachable by mouse.
The part of the problem is not WMs, but Xinerama-unaware toolkits, which
can wish to place some dialog windows into that area. At least FVWM has a
feature to move all such windows into visible space. Other Xinerama-aware
WMs (I've made a quick survey of almost all of them, except AfterStep)
should at least do *their* placement correctly.
> In short, why would I NOT want to buy this card?
The only reason can be 3D, which is not "bleeding edge" on Matrox.
_________________________________________
Dmitry Yu. Bolkhovityanov
The Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics
Novosibirsk, Russia
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