Comment 52 for bug 58721

Hello,
Running Xubuntu Edgy here.

After upgrading to a G550 (AGP, single head DVI), my system suffered:-
1) crash upon display of login window
2) can't even boot the install CD
3) Xfce rodent very dark (black screen) during boot with LCD dropout - "No Signal"
Thank-you Thomas for the FBDev hack which fixed #1.

4) glxgears blank
Thank-you John for the recompiled library which fixed #4.

Somthing is still wrong though:-
5) flickering display
6) MGA reports "VideoRAM: 16384 kByte" but card is 32MB
7) MGA reports "PixClock max 130 MHz" but probe of monitor reports 1200MHz maximum.

Problem #7 prevents 75Hz display, which I thought was the cause of the flickering, but it turns out Windows only runs 60Hz but displays beautifully with the drivers from Matrox. In linux, when fsck runs I can see that even the low-res console text is flickering.

Edgy includes Xorg 7.1.1 but the installation script for the official Matrox drivers crashes (supports up to version 7.0.0 only). According to the readme file, DVI output requires the proprietary "hal" driver, so maybe I'm lucky to be seeing anything at all. I am considering downgrading my Xorg to version 7.0.0 until Matrox upgrade their driver or release their source code.

[On a side note, is it reasonable to expect Matrox to compile so many drivers? New versions of Xorg seem to come out every few months, compared to Windows every few years, so it's like 10 times the work for 10% of the customers.]