freebsd7, radeon, xorg-server -> deadlock or so

[Warren Block]

On Wed, 10 Feb 2010, Christof Schulze wrote:

>> The situation is heavily unsatisfying, since one need an expensive
>> AMD/ATi Radeon card to gain non-3D poor functionality, where a cheaper
>> one should be do the same - but the cheaper ones don't work. Even if one
>> uses AMD64, the situattion is worse and I have no reason using
>> Linux-driver on a FreeBSD box. Hope the situation gets cleared in the
>> nearest future. It's a kind of deadlock. As I said, either spenig a lot
>> of money for a working RV770 based AMD graphics card with poor
>> functionality or nothing so far, since most smaller RV730 chips aren't
>> supported properly by the most recent drivers.
> To be fair - my ATI X300 has always worked. It is a cheap card with low-end
> performance but it is perfectly fine for regular desktop-use.

The older chipsets are better supported because the newer ones are, 
well, newer.  If you haven't bought a video card yet, look at the 
radeon(4x) man page first.

Unfortunately, that doesn't help if you already have a newer card, or a 
notebook.

The other choices are Intel, where they don't have standalone video 
cards, or nVidia, which has a full-featured blob and a really bare-bones 
open driver.

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA