Advice reqd with XVesa and Matrox G200 card

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Advice reqd with XVesa and Matrox G200 card
started by: b1ackmai1er

Posted by b1ackmai1er on June 24 2005,12:35

I have v1.2.1 frugal installation. My video card is a Matrox Millenium G200 AGP - MGA G200 B8 chipset , 250Mhz RAMDAC, 8mb RAM, BIOS vn 2.6.020

DSL recognizes the card and selects the "mga" driver. My google research says that this driver supports my card. However using the XVesa control Applet, I cant access any resolution beyond 800x600. This card supports resolutions much higher than that and I have tested them in windows XP.

Would anyone have any suggestions as to why I can't select a resolution beyond 800x600.

Thanks for your consideration.
b1m1

Edit: topic title imcorrectly states 1024x768. Message text is correct.

Posted by b1ackmai1er on June 25 2005,18:30

OK, this is what I found out.

Because DSL used Xvesa, only graphics modes supported by the BIOS chip on your video card can be used.

Use the Xvesa -listmodes command to see what the BIOS thinks it can do. Xvesa -force - listmodes may also list some extra modes that may or may not work.

The reason I could not get above 800x600 was because that was all the VESA BIOS on my video card supported. To resolve the issue I was able to download a more up-to-date BIOS from the Matrox site which supported the higher resolutions.

The only other solution is to install the full version of XFree86 which has it's own drivers for each video card and does not use the VESA BIOS.

Hope this is of help to someone else.

Regards b1m1