What Kind Of People Use X.Org's VESA Driver?

[frantaylor]

The ES1000 should be supported by the radeon driver -- it's basically an RN50 spec'ed without 3D IIRC.

"should" is the operative word here. It is not.

[Thev00d00]

Personally I think the 'lol vesa' vote was high. Its a web poll after all

[MNKyDeth]

Personally, I would never use a free driver over a binary blob unless the free driver performed the same or better compared to the blob.

I do use the vesa driver before the blob gets installed. I also use it as a fail safe in case something does go wrong.

But in the end I guess I am lucky and never had any real issues with using blobs.
I also prefer using drivers from the chip makers website instead of from repo's for the various distro's. It allows me to upgrade when new release's come out instead of whenever the distro decides to update it.

[bridgman]

"should" is the operative word here. It is not.

That's odd. Normally we hear about server graphics problems *very* quickly, and I haven't heard anything this time.

There are a couple of relatively recent bugs open on fdo - do either of those match what you are seeing ? One is a RandR problem with dual displays, the other looks like a LUT issue but no logs or other info attached :

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23970

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21548

[RagingDragon]

If I recall correctly, isn't the VESA driver is required for some VNC features to work? So for a server or virtual machine controlled by remote VNC access VESA might make sense. Also there are servers out there running RHEL4 and other out of date distros which likely have old drivers that lack support for the latest ATI and Nvidia integrated and server GPU's.

[Kano]

If you want to share the current desktop using x11vnc you just have to disable composite effects.

[yehdev_cc]

hi ... (first post ^_^)
I'm not using it right now, but I think I'll do soon if I insist on going on using fedora 12 and KDE ... I have radeon hd 3200 and KWIN has very annoying issues with the open source radeon driver ..

[MostAwesomeDude]

I'll accept Poulsbo or any other SGX chipsets as a valid reason for VESA.

ES1000, as bridgman said, should work fine as long as you keep in mind that it's a crappy little chip not meant for anything besides text consoles and very mild 2D.

VIA chipsets are a crapshoot, but I think we've got 2D for just about all of them, which means VESA confers no advantage.

For nVidia and ATI/AMD chipsets, there's no excuse. Between nouveau and nv, radeon and (sigh) radeonhd, there's drivers that support everything except Evergreen, and Evergreens come with a CD with fglrx on it, which is non-optimal but enough to get you started. (If I understand correctly, Evergreens can't really run on VESA if you want DisplayPort outputs to work right, but I might be wrong on that.)

I only complained about this because I thought that 2-3% of respondents was a bit high for actual usage and a bit low for Anonymous having fun with us.

~ C.

[kolstae]

fglrx not working on openSUSE 11.2

I recently got an ATI 5750 card and had no luck with the latest Catalyst on my openSUSE 11.2. Installation fails silently ...

That leaves me vesa

[init7]

people who got their notebook's lcd monitor somehow beat up, and nvidia or nv is a no. vesa is a yes, although it comes with extra vertical lines