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[keesan AT iamjlamb.com]

We have a large collection of PCI video cards which I just spent
a few hours testing to see how well they worked with linux.

All but one works with Xvesa - the bad one is an Alliance Promotion
Diamond Stealth 1994, which repeatedly crashed linux when I tried
to display in Xvesa at 800 resolution.  I got something with wavering
outlines before it crashed and I had to reboot.  It was also 
totally useless with links 2.19 (graphical).  A lot of video modes
were listed when I typed links2 -g -mode 1 (this gives me an error
message with a list of the correct modes to type instead of 1)
but none of them worked right.  I only saw the top part of the screen.

Not too good with Xvesa - a Tseng (unusually fast) ET6000 1996
which works fine at 800 resolution but won't display at all in 
Xvesa at 1024 except in 2-bit color, or at all in Links2, which
does not offer 2-bit color depth.  

I next tested with SVGAlib - links2.
An older S3 Vision 964 and a newer (4M RAM) Diamond Stealth
with Rendition video chip (Japan) would display at a maximum
of 640x480x256 (the highest resolutions listed for links).
An ATI Mach 64 would display 800 at 16M colors but no 1024
They all worked fine with Xvesa.

A Trident 8900 worked fine except for acting as if it had
1M instead of 2M RAM in links-graphical (1024-256 colors
in links, but 64K in XVesa).  

I don't know what seejpeg uses but it did not work with:
1 of 3 Cirrus cards (it displayed in blue)
2 of 2 Alliance cards
3 Trident cards
1 Tseng card
zgv worked with these cards

I had perfect results with S3 Trio64 and Virge, Cirrus except
for blue seejpeg with one car, and an STB with unnamed video.  

I would therefore advise using for linux an S3 trio64 or virge,
a Cirrus, a Trident if you don't use seejpeg, or an STB.

If you will not be using 1024 resolution at all, Tseng is okay, 
and ATI works at 1024 with Xvesa but not SVGAlib.

The Alliance should be recycled, the Stealth and oldest S3
not used with SVGAlib unless you don't want 800 resolution.

DOS ghostscript will display at higher resolution with
Trident and Tseng.  I have no idea how to use ghostscript
at higher resolution in linux - could not get it to
work under X and there are no video-card-specific DEVICEs.

Re:  resizecons - I actually did manage to resize it to 
132 columns but I don't have any fonts less then 8 pixels wide
so the lines all wrapped and it was not very readable.  
Anyone know how to get smaller fonts working in the 
console with more columns?  DOS is much easier to resize.
Do I need to boot with lilo and use vga=ask?