[TriLUG] Recommendation for a video card?

Ed Blackman ed at edgewood.to
Thu Oct 3 14:22:18 EDT 2013


A few months ago I upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 (LTS), entering 
the world of kernel modesetting for video cards.

Unfortunately, my ancient video cards don't support kernel modesetting.  
I had to add "nomodeset" to the kernel command line in Grub to get the 
system to boot, and the Xorg logs say "[KMS] drm report modesetting 
isn't supported."

I've also noticed that the graphics seem to be much slower, and now get 
occasional corruption.  I mostly log in to this machine via SSH for a 
terminal (which is why I haven't done anything about this until now), 
but want to replace the cards with something that will work better.

I currently have Radeon 9200 PRO (eg RV280, on AGP) and Radeon 7200 (eg 
R100, on PCI) connected to dual displays.  The secondary display hasn't 
worked since I upgraded.  I'm planning on replacing the whole system in 
a year or so, and don't want to spend too much.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a new card?

Must have:
- works well out of the box or with minimal setup (eg, "apt-get install driver-package")
- less than $100 (or $150 for dual displays)
- easy to order online (ie, no "model A of the card isn't supported, but 
   it's hard to tell what model you're getting") or available from a 
   Apex-area source

Nice to have:
- open source driver
- dual displays

Don't need:
- gaming class 3D performance

Alternately, if there's something I can do to get faster, uncorrupt 
displays from my current cards, I'm willing to try that.

-- 
Ed Blackman


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