Zugschlusbeobachtungen

A few months, I blogged about the pains I had with my nVidia FX 5200 graphics card, Debian and current kernels.

I have solved the issue in the mean time and would like to document what I did. This has been updated to reflect driver 173.14.20 from July 2009.

My home workplace is slowly and steadily mutating into a never ending story. I do not remember blogging every aspect of it, but after three graphics cards, an even older mainboard and two DVB-S-Cards, my home workplace PC currently does what I expect it to do: Run Debian unstable, drive two 20 inch DVI TFT monitors with 1600x1200 pixels each and receiving DVB-S transmissions. I do not think that these are exaggerated expectations, but it took over three months to find a combination of hardware which will actually do what I want.

The hardest part was finding a AGP graphics card which can drive two DVI monitors with 1600x1200 pixels each. After failing with two different Matrox cards (the G550 not being able to do 1600x1200 pixels if the monitors are connected via DVI), I finally settled on a used GeForce FX 5200. In the beginning, the binary nVidia module didn’t hurt as much as I expected. Unfortunately, this rapidly changed with the 2.6.27 Linux kernel.