newbie needs help with matrox card
 

first time user just got fedora 3 dual booting with windows 2000. looks wonderful. now...i have a matrox g200 quad video card working with my 4 monitors on win 2000. As this is my first day working with linux im totally lost as to how to make fedora 3 work with my card to see all 4 monitors or even if it can be done. any advice woudl be greatly appreciated. btw i bought several linux books but could not figure it out. i see be going to system settings and then display that is sees my card but its only working on my first monitor. thanks in advance and cant wait to make the move away from windows...yuck

Your best bet is to see if Matrox has a Linux driver / X11 driver for that card...

If they don't (does Matrox exist still - sounds old?) you're out of luck. I do suspect that Nvidia's unified Linux driver can drive the applicable Nvidia cards under Xwindows in Linux with multi-headed displays.

Isn't Matrox a old Nvidia card? I think it is but I am not real sure. I may be thinking about the M400 or something.

Just a thought, not worth much though.

:D :D :D :D

OT: Matrox != nVidia
 

Matrox, nVidia and ATi are all separate companies churning out graphics cards.

nVidia did buy 3dfx in the past though.

Matrox do still produce cards these days, but since ATi and nVidia have now captured the market for 3D performance, Matrox apparently focuses these days on 'niche markets'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/nVidia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Technologies

thank you for your responses...as mentioned in new to this so please bear with me...i dowloaded from http://matrox.com/mga/support/drivers/latest/home.cfm the driver for the g200 card for linux version 4.1...I untarred etc and ran the installation script. during setup it says...Current version of X is not found. Choose a version from below.
[4.3.0, 6.7.0, 6.8.0, 6.8.1, press ENTER to exit]:

I had no idea what this meant so i selected 6.8.1 and hit enter and it shot out a bunch of new files in front of me. I'm assuming I did whatever i did correctly becasue now when i run the script after it gives the message above and i again select 6.8.1 it says...Summary:

XFree86 driver: Up to date.
HAL library: Up to date.

ok linux community help ! it was hard enough for a first time guy ot cd to the correct places and learn to untar and install the ?driver?. But I still just have the one monitor. Im now reading about modules and adding them to the kernal etc. Am I even in the right ballpark? did i dowload the correct software?

thank you hope with some assistance i can work this out. perhaps some day i can then be in a position to help a newbie :)

We have this card in one of our systems and it works fine (RH 9.0,
kernel 2.4.20, XFree86 4.3.0).

Since we have several systems with different video hardware, I wrote
a script that generates the desired XF86Config file from a few description
files (actually templates). You can get it at the following link:
http://www.let.uu.nl/~Theo.Veenker/p...uickxsetup.tgz
Read the README.

I too had to install mga_drv.o and mga_hal_drv.o into
/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/

If you don't have these look for a file called mgadrivers-3.0.tgz (probably
got it from the Matrox site).

If you still can't get it to work contact the Matrox linux support guru. He will plough
through tons of debug data to find your answer.

Good luck,
Theo

thanks i've posted on matrox's site lets see if they get back to me.

ok now this is gonna make some of you groan...but like i said im new...i see the files mentioned in the correct directory and I did a ls -l (cause im getting good) to see that they are executables...what do i do now?

If you are in the directory where the file is just type in ./<name of file> and it should run. The ./ tells it to run where you are. If you don't put that in then you have to put in the whole path to where the file is, like, /home/dale/Desktop/<file name>. Otherwise you would have to put in in /bin, /sbin or where the rest of the executables are.

That will make sense one day. It took me a while too. :tisk:

Later

:D :D :D

ok delek you are saying go to the /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/
directory and then run both the executables?
ok here i go :) worst that happens is i wipe out linux and reinstall :)

ok says cant execute binary file...ok i guess i need to reread all the posts again thank everybody.

TheoV my system has whats called xorg.conf instead of XF86Conf do i still run your create-XF86Config script? Again I see the appropriate drivers in my /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers directory (the mga_drv.o and mga_hal_drv.o files.). If im getting this right I need to get my xorg.conf file to include the mga_drv.o and mga_hal_drv.o files in my /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers directory? then my these drivers will allow me to use my other monitors? here is my xorg.conf file as it is now. Am I supposed to edit this to somehow include the drivers? also what does Identifier "single head configuration" man? that sounds incorrect. thanks again for your patience its all greek to me.

# Xorg configuration created by system-config-display

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "single head configuration"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"

# RgbPath is the location of the RGB database. Note, this is the name of the
# file minus the extension (like ".txt" or ".db"). There is normally
# no need to change the default.
# Multiple FontPath entries are allowed (they are concatenated together)
# By default, Red Hat 6.0 and later now use a font server independent of
# the X server to render fonts.
RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
FontPath "unix/:7100"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "dbe"
Load "extmod"
Load "fbdevhw"
Load "glx"
Load "record"
Load "freetype"
Load "type1"
Load "dri"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"

# Specify which keyboard LEDs can be user-controlled (eg, with xset(1))
# Option "Xleds" "1 2 3"
# To disable the XKEYBOARD extension, uncomment XkbDisable.
# Option "XkbDisable"
# To customise the XKB settings to suit your keyboard, modify the
# lines below (which are the defaults). For example, for a non-U.S.
# keyboard, you will probably want to use:
# Option "XkbModel" "pc102"
# If you have a US Microsoft Natural keyboard, you can use:
# Option "XkbModel" "microsoft"
#
# Then to change the language, change the Layout setting.
# For example, a german layout can be obtained with:
# Option "XkbLayout" "de"
# or:
# Option "XkbLayout" "de"
# Option "XkbVariant" "nodeadkeys"
#
# If you'd like to switch the positions of your capslock and
# control keys, use:
# Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:swapcaps"
# Or if you just want both to be control, use:
# Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:nocaps"
#
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Gateway EV900"
DisplaySize 360 270
HorizSync 30.0 - 86.0
VertRefresh 50.0 - 120.0
Option "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "mga"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "Matrox Millennium G200"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
Modes "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1280x960" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Group 0
Mode 0666
EndSection

(END)

The mga is already in your Device section. So that's OK. I think the mga driver will
try the load the hal module if it needs to (or something).

I don't know the configuration system you have. Could very well be that I'm running
behind a few years. I'm running RedHat 9.0, kernel 2.4.20, XFree86 4.3.0.
If you run the xdpyinfo command it will tell you which xserver you are running.
uname -a gives info on your OS.

To know how to get multiheaded display, I would first try the distribution provided
X configuration tool. If that doesn't know about your video hardware (which seems
to be the case?), then I'm afraid you read some manual pages (type "man foo"
to know something about "foo", try man xorf.conf). Yes the Linux road is often
bumby. I hate using Windows, but you have to admit, most things just work
there.

Anyway, in your xorg.conf you have a ServerLayout section. Here you have to
specify how you want your screens organized. If you want your display to
be four screens wide you need something like this in your ServerLayout
section:
Screen "Screen 0"
Screen "Screen 1" RightOf "Screen 0"
Screen "Screen 2" RightOf "Screen 1"
Screen "Screen 3" RightOf "Screen 2"
Other layouts are possible of course.

But you have to define "Screen 0" etc. first! If you run my create-XF86Config
script (after changing the // at line 20 into #, sorry about that) with file config1,
then you get my XF86Config in the tmp directory. Make sure your xorg.conf
file looks (more or less) like the generated XF86Config file. Since the G200
has four outputs, your config file must have four Monitor sections, four Device
sections and four Screen sections. Just study the XF86Config file, read the
manual page for the config file

If you like you can specify multiple layouts in the x-config file. The xserver
will take the first one or the one flagged DefaultServerLayout.

HTH

"The mga is already in your Device section. So that's OK. I think the mga driver will
try the load the hal module if it needs to (or something)."

thanks its gonna be work considering i dont even know what my mga or my hal is...btw my X version says 6.8.1 and my kernal says 2.6.9-1.667 for what its worth. I can only imagine what this was like for the uninitiated 10 years ago :)

This is a real newbie question but here goes. As I (hopefully) move forward with linux I figure its best just to suck it up and ask the dumb questions so I can learn as opposed to just following directions. As to what im doing.? there is a configuration file named xorg.conf that used to be called XF86Config. This file tells my actuall X software what "drivers" (like hal and mga) to load and other specifications such as monitors, resolutions etc that are on my system. this file must be manually told what my hardware is in a specific format as well as what ?drivers/modules? to load to run the hardware. run your script then review it and make the necessary changes im my xorg.conf and i should be ok? it should automatically see the 4 monitors? Am I kind of getting this? thanks.