Argh. Matrox.
So I upgraded to Fedora Core 5 for my workstation. Which comes with the Xorg 1.0.1 server. For those of you who are blessed enough to use a system where video drivers are a non issue (because every card is well supported: Windows or only a few cards are actually available: Mac), let me tell you that every version change of the X Window System on Linux is a cause for concern.
As I have a Matrox G550 in my computer which drives two LCDs using digital (DVI) protocol, this certainly is. (I have a Matrox card because I wanted an open source driver. Fat luck. If you want to use DVI or dual display, you something called mgaHALlib.a which contains the magic to turn on these features on Matrox boards. Probably some sacred bit shuffling in there. Whatever.
S0 Xorg-1.01, which is the X11R7 release. Cool new stuff. However, my screens stayed dark. Some googling told me that this configuration is unsupported and the advice from the Matrox support people is downgrade to 6.8.2. However, there are a number of success reports on that board, too.
In the end, I built a zombie from the Fedora Core 5 driver, the mgaHALlib.a and (no joking here) a module stolen from the 6.8.2 driver which the mga driver tries to load but does not find it. It seems that this module just contains a few stubs.
So if you want to use Fedora Core 5, the mga driver and digital output, just get that driver from my download site. It works for me (I’m currently writing this blog entry with it), YMMV.
closed source fedora g550 linux matrox xorg