NeoMagic & Savage Linux X.Org Drivers Updated For Late 90's Graphics

Longtime X.Org release wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle spent some of his Easter working out new releases of seldom-touched X.Org graphics/display drivers.

After recently updating some other vintage xf86-video DDX drivers, Coopersmith on Sunday released xf86-video-neomagic 1.3.1 and xf86-video-savage 2.4 as the newest versions of these drivers for long-obsolete NeoMagic and Savage graphics.

NeoMagic graphics were more common in laptops during the back half of the 1990's before the company ended up leaving the laptop market in 2000. The X.Org/XFree86 driver dates back to those days though the hardware hasn't been too common now in over two decades while this xf86-video-neomagic driver occasionally sees fixes.

The xf86-video-neomagic 1.3.1 release has some compiler warning fixes, switches from Bzip2 to XZ tarballs, and fixes some spelling/word issues. Overall though it's a tiny update. The v1.3.1 point release is the first new version of xf86-video-neomagic in four years.

The other vintage Easter driver update is xf86-video-savage 2.4 for Savage graphics also from the late 1990's. With xf86-video-savage 2.4 there is improved support for building with the X.Org Server 1.19 series and newer. Plus this Savage X.Org driver update has some build system fixes/updates and some other build-related fixes.

The xf86-video-savage 2.4 release is the first update in six years to this open-source display driver.