200 lines
4.9 KiB
HTML
200 lines
4.9 KiB
HTML
<HTML
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>Hardware requirements</TITLE
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>The Linux XFree86 HOWTO</TH
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><A
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NAME="AEN68"
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>2. Hardware requirements</A
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></H1
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><P
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>You can find an up-to-date list of supported cards and chipset types
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at <A
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HREF="http://www.xfree86.org/4.1.0/Status.html"
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TARGET="_top"
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>the 4.1.0 status page</A
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>.</P
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><P
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>The documentation included with your video adaptor should specify the
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chipset used. If you are in the market for a new video card, or are
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buying a new machine that comes with a video card, have the vendor
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find out exactly what the make, model, and chipset of the video card
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is. This may require the vendor to call technical support on your
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behalf; in general vendors will be happy to do this. Many PC hardware
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vendors will state that the video card is a ``standard SVGA card''
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which ``should work'' on your system. Explain that your software
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(mention Linux and XFree86!) does not support all video chipsets and
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that you must have detailed information.</P
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><P
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>You can also determine your videocard chipset by running the
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<B
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CLASS="COMMAND"
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>SuperProbe</B
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> program included with the XFree86 distribution.
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This is covered in more detail below.</P
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><P
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>Supported video cards will work with all bus types, including ISA and
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VLB and PCI.</P
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><P
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>One problem faced by the XFree86 developers is that some video card
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manufacturers use non-standard mechanisms for determining clock
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frequencies used to drive the card. Some of these manufacturers either
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don't release specifications describing how to program the card, or
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they require developers to sign a non-disclosure statement to obtain
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the information. This would obviously restrict the free distribution
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of the XFree86 software, something that the XFree86 development team
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is not willing to do. For a long time, this has been a problem with
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certain video cards manufactured by Diamond, but as of release 3.1 of
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XFree86, Diamond has started to work with the development team to
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release free drivers for these cards.</P
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><P
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>The suggested setup for XFree86 under Linux is a 486 or better with at
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least 8 megabytes of RAM, and a video card with a chipset listed
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above. For optimal performance, we suggest using an accelerated card,
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such as an S3-chipset card. You should check the documentation for
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XFree86 and verify that your particular card is supported before
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taking the plunge and purchasing expensive hardware.</P
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><P
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>As a side note, the personal Linux system of Matt Welsh (this FAQ's
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originator) was a 486DX2-66, 20 megabytes of RAM, equipped with a VLB
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S3-864 chipset card with 2 megabytes of DRAM. He ran X benchmarks on
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this machine as well as on Sun Sparc IPX workstations. The Linux
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system was roughly 7 times faster than the Sparc IPX (for the curious,
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XFree86-3.1 under Linux, with this video card, runs at around 171,000
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xstones; the Sparc IPX at around 24,000). In general, XFree86 on a
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Linux system with an accelerated SVGA card will give you much greater
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performance than that found on commercial UNIX workstations (which
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usually employ simple framebuffers for graphics).</P
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><P
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>Your machine will need at least 4 megabytes of physical RAM, and 16
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megabytes of virtual RAM (for example, 8 megs physical and 8 megs swap).
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Remember that the more physical RAM that you have, the less that the system
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will swap to and from disk when memory is low. Because swapping is
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inherently slow (disks are very slow compared to memory), having 8
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megabytes of RAM or more is necessary to run XFree86 comfortably. 16 is
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better. A system with 4 megabytes of physical RAM could run
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<EM
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>much</EM
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> (up to 10 times) more slowly than one with 8 megs
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or more.</P
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></DIV
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ALIGN="left"
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VALIGN="top"
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><A
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HREF="x38.html"
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>Prev</A
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></TD
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ALIGN="center"
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>Home</A
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HREF="x81.html"
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>Next</A
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><TR
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><TD
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WIDTH="33%"
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VALIGN="top"
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>Introduction</TD
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><TD
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WIDTH="34%"
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ALIGN="center"
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VALIGN="top"
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> </TD
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><TD
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WIDTH="33%"
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ALIGN="right"
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VALIGN="top"
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>Installing XFree86</TD
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> |