ARK Logic X.Org Driver Sees 2023 Update For 90's PCI Video Card

A week after seeing X.Org display driver updates for old Trident and S3 Graphics hardware, a new release of xf86-video-ark is now available that provides the open-source UMS display driver support for old ARK Logic hardware. ARK Logic only lasted through the 1990's as a purveyor of PCI video cards.

While not as notable as the S3, 3dfx, ATI Rage, or other Linux display drivers still seeing the once-in-a-few-years open-source activity, the xf86-video-ark driver for the less notable ARK Logic hardware still sees a random commit and a new release every decade or so.

ARK Logic PCI cards go for just $39+ on eBay.

Alan Coopersmith at Oracle who generally serves as the X.Org package wrangler to issue new versions of these seldom touched drivers was the one to publish xf86-video-ark 0.7.6. He issued the new release on the basis that various Linux distributions are still packaging this driver, though it's not clear if anyone is still making use of it at all.

The new xf86-video-ark 0.7.6 release is needed for properly building against X.Org Server 1.14 and newer, which itself was released back in 2013. Given there seems to have been no complaints about the ARK Logic driver support breaking with newer X.Org servers of the past decade, it's doubtable if anyone is still using these PCI video cards with a modern Linux desktop stack.

Aside from fixing compatibility with xorg-server 1.14+, there is just a handful of other patches for this once-in-a-decade driver release and mostly revolving around updated documentation, switching from BZIP2 to XZ tarballs, and other maintenance changes. See the release announcement for all the details.