Oh Hardware, How Do I Love Thee?
After a couple of weeks of frustrating instability (typically X wedging itself and needing to be killed) and the discovery that only one of my available pool of video cards would even display the BIOS screen on my motherboard without corruption, let alone boot safely, I finally bit the bullet and snagged a replacement motherboard (Asus A7V600X) from ebay. Mercifully, things now seem to be blissfully stable.
This also meant I could swap out the GeForce 4MX for a Radeon 9250 I'd acquired, which is fanless and actually has open-sourced drivers with sensible acceleration. This is a definite win. The only irritation is that the Xv video scaler seems to be stunningly stupidly implemented - when rendering a video to a natively-sized window, rather than just blitting it as-is, it appears to be rendering it at full screen resolution (1600x1200 in this case) and then scaling it down to the display size... This does not make for terribly legible subtitles, among other things. (Viewing in full-screen mode is fine, of course.) I suppose the question is: do I attempt to brave the TLA soup that is X to try and fix this (assuming it's not a hardware limitation...)?
Since this was clearly far too much stability for my brain, I also upgraded to XOrg 7.1, which seems to render things somewhat faster than 7.0, but also to have b0rked Flash (this may be an EXA bug; I'll try going back to XAA and see if that fixes it). (Update: Yes, it does. Fixes are here.)
Oh, and they've changed the way you configure a mouse in X again. If anyone's trying to get a Logitech MX1000 working in XOrg 7.1, you might want to try the following:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "MX1000"
Driver "evdev"
Option "vendor" "0x046d"
Option "product" "0xc50e"
Option "HWHEELRelativeAxisButtons" "7 6"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "false"
EndSection
(The HWHEEL line is needed because with my mouse the tilt wheel appears to be laterally reversed by default.)
Also: I found a bug. Do I win yet?
This also meant I could swap out the GeForce 4MX for a Radeon 9250 I'd acquired, which is fanless and actually has open-sourced drivers with sensible acceleration. This is a definite win. The only irritation is that the Xv video scaler seems to be stunningly stupidly implemented - when rendering a video to a natively-sized window, rather than just blitting it as-is, it appears to be rendering it at full screen resolution (1600x1200 in this case) and then scaling it down to the display size... This does not make for terribly legible subtitles, among other things. (Viewing in full-screen mode is fine, of course.) I suppose the question is: do I attempt to brave the TLA soup that is X to try and fix this (assuming it's not a hardware limitation...)?
Since this was clearly far too much stability for my brain, I also upgraded to XOrg 7.1, which seems to render things somewhat faster than 7.0, but also to have b0rked Flash (this may be an EXA bug; I'll try going back to XAA and see if that fixes it). (Update: Yes, it does. Fixes are here.)
Oh, and they've changed the way you configure a mouse in X again. If anyone's trying to get a Logitech MX1000 working in XOrg 7.1, you might want to try the following:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "MX1000"
Driver "evdev"
Option "vendor" "0x046d"
Option "product" "0xc50e"
Option "HWHEELRelativeAxisButtons" "7 6"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "false"
EndSection
(The HWHEEL line is needed because with my mouse the tilt wheel appears to be laterally reversed by default.)
Also: I found a bug. Do I win yet?