Mint doesn't make the most of my graphics card

[Colonel Panic]

Hi. I've recently bought a cheap, secondhand but very well known make of graphics card with 4MB of video RAM on board. In theory that should give me 24-bit colour at a resolution of 1024x768 (which is what I want), but in practice it defaults to 800x600 at a 16-bit colour depth.

The card is quite an old one, a Diamond Millennium 2000 3D with an S3 Virge graphics chip on board. Oh, and it's a PCI card as well (but this is an old computer).

Has anyone got any idea about what might be going wrong, and how I can best fix it?

Thanks in advance,

Best,

CP .

PS. This isn't just a Mint problem; I haven't fared much better with the other Linux distros I've tried with this card (Puppy and Vector). It's still a perfectly usable system but I was hoping for better with my "new" graphics card.

[LarryP]

Hi colnel that certainly is an old card the last thing I saw that supported it was windows 95. Somebody may correct me if I'm wrong but it could be it's just too old and not common enough for better support. I admit I didn't look too long but you might find drivers somewhere but just a quick look from here I really didnt see anything newer than 2000 2001 in posts about it. Best of luck, and exactly what are you running that card in just general nosyness in asking

[Colonel Panic]

Hi Larry, thanks for replying. Not only was it cheap, Diamond were (and for all I know still are) a good and popular make so I thought it would be easy to get drivers for it. Plus, 4MB is most likely all I really need - as I said, I'd be more than happy with 24-bit colour depth at 1024x768 resolution when I've been used to 16-bit at the same resolution.

You may be right about drivers being in short supply, though I'll keep trying.

[richyrich]

Since Mint has a new experiment with Debian (LMDE), I have found the smxi/sgfxi scripts to help with a lot of legacy hardware.
http://smxi.org/site/about.htm
This would only be helpful to you if you would be interested in trying out the Mint Debian experimental edition (Live DVD to try), installing it, and then installing smxi to see if it would help with your graphics . . . so, it's surely up to you ! and good luck . . richy

[h2-1]

try forcing the driver: sgfxi -N s3virge

Sometimes X makes the wrong guess about which driver to use, and if you explicitly state it in xorg.conf it can sometimes work.

[LarryP]

Good looks like people who know more than me came by with some help. . And colnel I do hope what I posted aboutnthe age of the card was taken as being mean .I am old enough to remember the cards available back then and diamond was a very good card as well as voodoo 3d cards In fact i remember coveting some of those cards. Think i had a500 meg k6 running 196 megs of ram because my mobo wouldn't support 256 megs or I just couldn't afford more lol

[Colonel Panic]

Thanks for the replies and the script suggestions. I think I'll try that sgfxi option (I use Mint 8 XFCE but would certainly consider trying Mint Debian in due course).

Cheers,

CP .

[richyrich]

Whoa there, sgfxi does not work on any *buntu based distro . . . (not on your Mint 8 Xfce)

smxi is an interactive script designed to help people maintain their systems. It supports Debian (Stable, Testing, and Sid) and true Debian based distros (such as, but not limited to, AntiX, Aptosid, Epidemic, Linux Mint Debian [LMDE], Mepis). It does not support Ubuntu based distros because there are too many differences between Debian and Ubuntu.

[h2-1]

sgfxi works on Ubuntu, and has for a while now. It also works on ARch and Fedora, though I do not test that often to keep up with changes.

smxi and svmi do not work on ubuntu, nor will they ever work on ubuntu, since it's too much work.