[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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