4 ms·

Before I was a Linux type I was a Windows expert, and when I went freelance in 1996, I built myself a fairly serious NT 4 rig: Pentium II 450, 192MB of RAM

by lproven 1mo ago

Before I was a Linux type I was a Windows expert, and when I went freelance in 1996, I built myself a fairly serious NT 4 rig: Pentium II 450, 192MB of RAM (I think), and dual Matrox Millennium cards so I could drive dual 14-15 inch CRT (glass) screens as a single big display. I think I kept those cards, as a pair, in my next 3 or 4 PCs – I know I was still using them about a decade later, because when I switched from SUSE to Ubuntu in 2004, Ubuntu's very screen-config tools couldn't configure 2 GPUs and so I had to keep SUSE around for several years in dual boot. Every time I made some screen config change or whatever, I booted into SUSE, set up my Matrox cards and then copied `/etc/X11/xorg.conf` into my Ubuntu partition, then I could reboot into Ubuntu and use them. Ubuntu finally caught up around release 6.06 or something. I didn't stay on two 14" displays for long... then two 15", then a 17" plus a 15", then the widescreen luxury of dual 17" Idek Iiyama displays. :-) I stopped playing video games much decades ago, so I never cared about what 3D performance was like. Nor did 99% of my consultancy clients. As 3D cards gradually became the norm, I used to install the free Microsoft-advertising version of the Computer Artworks "Organic Art" screensaver: https://cuttlefish.org/archive/earlysites/artworks/organic-art/index.html ... just so the 3D card had something to do. It looked impressive, and when Windows 2000 was new, watching how smoothly the screensaver ran was quite a treat. When the app first came out it was like a slideshow. What was good news for me was when LCD flat screens started to appear: lots of people and companies started throwing out even high-end high-quality CRT screens, and big ones too. For years I ran a pair of 21" Trinitron displays which cost a fortune new. I filled my garage with good quality CRTs just as spares. I had a small and rather sickly cat and she vomited a lot. There is a nice big warm flat space on the back of a big CRT ideal for a cat to take naps on. She killed dozens of monitors, by vomiting into them, but I had so many spares that for several years I simply didn't care. I sent them to the recycling and grabbed another one from the spares.

altcognito 1mo ago
> Before I was a Linux type I was a Windows expert, and when I went freelance in 1996, I built myself a fairly serious NT 4 rig: Pentium II 450, 192MB of RAM (I think), and dual Matrox Millennium cards so I could drive dual 14-15 inch CRT (glass) screens as a single big display. Just to get the timeline right -- the PII 450 wasn't released until 98, so I'm assuming this is about when you mean. I always thought it would be awesome to get a Matrox card but settled for the ATI cards (I can't remember when I got my first dual display but I remember that Matrox made quad head cards pretty early. > For years I ran a pair of 21" Trinitron displays which cost a fortune new. These things were so heavy.
- NetMageSCW 1mo ago
  Yes they were. I worked for a small computer company and decided to buy my own 21” monitor for work and was impatient and I spent $75 (back when that was ridiculous) having it FedExed halfway across the state so I could get it a couple of days sooner. I’ve used a big monitor setup ever since (part of my sign-up incentive for my current job was a 30” monitor) and currently have two 16:10 30” monitors.
- lproven 1mo ago
  Oh my! Well, from faint 30-years-on recollection, it was the end of '96 so I guess I needed to save up for it. Thanks for the correction! Ordinary relatively cheap consumer Matrox cards could be paired up. I couldn't afford a fancy dual-output card, but I could afford 2 second-hand Matrox Millennium cards, and that did the job fine. At that time, Matrox was about the only brand of (parallel PCI) graphics card where the drivers could handle multiple cards. You couldn't do it with ATI or S3 or any of the other commodity GPUs back then, but any old Matrox with any other of around the same generation worked. They could have dissimilar amounts of memory and things and it still worked. About 20 years later, I was working at SUSE in Prague, and we had lots of old nVidia cards available in the office spares pile, and lots of spare LCDs around the 22" - 24" size range. Two screens was easy: most nVidia pro-range cards can drive 2 outputs. I had the desk space and available screens, so I decided to try 3. Then the nightmare began. Nouveau doesn't care: if it's nVidia, it'll drive it. But nVidia's own drivers are tied to specific GPU generations, but those generations are not marked on the card or in the easily-accessible specs anywhere. It's mostly a case of installing the card, booting Linux, seeing what the driver describes the GPU family generation as, and then Googling to try to find which of the random pile of cards to hand is a matching GPU family and generation. I never got 3 screens working together adequately, and the combinations crashed my OS often. For emergencies I kept a Windows partition and its behaviour with mismatched cards is quite funny in an annoying way. 1. Boot 2. Identify first card 3. Work out matching driver for card 1, download it, install it 4. Reboot 5. Find second card 6. Work out matching driver for card 2, download it, install it 7. Card 1 now does not work. So... 8. Work out matching driver for card 1, download it, install it 9. Reboot 10. Second card now does not work. 11. Work out matching driver for card 2, download it, install it... It would sit there taking 10min or so per loop until you pulled the plug. With Linux, it's just a case of: Human IDs GPU; manually installs driver; sees if both cards work. The answer is, generally, "no", so: Swear, remove one card, substitute, try again. Eventually I went to the IT department who gave me an elderly, huge, AMD card. 2 full length slots, 2 cooling fans, and a decade old so rubbish performance by 20-teens standards. But, 4 display outputs, and use any combination you want -- and native FOSS drivers, so no need to manually install anything. Joy, peace, and calm descended. Then a couple of months later, COVID... and working off a little Dell laptop with only an Intel onboard GPU and one external screen. I did in the end get 2 external screens and the built in screen working, but only using an X11 desktop that didn't do much fancy 3D rendering (Xfce) because it didn't have enough VRAM for triple-head and compositing.

by lproven 1mo ago

altcognito 1mo ago

> Before I was a Linux type I was a Windows expert, and when I went freelance in 1996, I built myself a fairly serious NT 4 rig: Pentium II 450, 192MB of RAM (I think), and dual Matrox Millennium cards so I could drive dual 14-15 inch CRT (glass) screens as a single big display. Just to get the timeline right -- the PII 450 wasn't released until 98, so I'm assuming this is about when you mean. I always thought it would be awesome to get a Matrox card but settled for the ATI cards (I can't remember when I got my first dual display but I remember that Matrox made quad head cards pretty early. > For years I ran a pair of 21" Trinitron displays which cost a fortune new. These things were so heavy.

NetMageSCW 1mo ago
Yes they were. I worked for a small computer company and decided to buy my own 21” monitor for work and was impatient and I spent $75 (back when that was ridiculous) having it FedExed halfway across the state so I could get it a couple of days sooner. I’ve used a big monitor setup ever since (part of my sign-up incentive for my current job was a 30” monitor) and currently have two 16:10 30” monitors.
lproven 1mo ago
Oh my! Well, from faint 30-years-on recollection, it was the end of '96 so I guess I needed to save up for it. Thanks for the correction! Ordinary relatively cheap consumer Matrox cards could be paired up. I couldn't afford a fancy dual-output card, but I could afford 2 second-hand Matrox Millennium cards, and that did the job fine. At that time, Matrox was about the only brand of (parallel PCI) graphics card where the drivers could handle multiple cards. You couldn't do it with ATI or S3 or any of the other commodity GPUs back then, but any old Matrox with any other of around the same generation worked. They could have dissimilar amounts of memory and things and it still worked. About 20 years later, I was working at SUSE in Prague, and we had lots of old nVidia cards available in the office spares pile, and lots of spare LCDs around the 22" - 24" size range. Two screens was easy: most nVidia pro-range cards can drive 2 outputs. I had the desk space and available screens, so I decided to try 3. Then the nightmare began. Nouveau doesn't care: if it's nVidia, it'll drive it. But nVidia's own drivers are tied to specific GPU generations, but those generations are not marked on the card or in the easily-accessible specs anywhere. It's mostly a case of installing the card, booting Linux, seeing what the driver describes the GPU family generation as, and then Googling to try to find which of the random pile of cards to hand is a matching GPU family and generation. I never got 3 screens working together adequately, and the combinations crashed my OS often. For emergencies I kept a Windows partition and its behaviour with mismatched cards is quite funny in an annoying way. 1. Boot 2. Identify first card 3. Work out matching driver for card 1, download it, install it 4. Reboot 5. Find second card 6. Work out matching driver for card 2, download it, install it 7. Card 1 now does not work. So... 8. Work out matching driver for card 1, download it, install it 9. Reboot 10. Second card now does not work. 11. Work out matching driver for card 2, download it, install it... It would sit there taking 10min or so per loop until you pulled the plug. With Linux, it's just a case of: Human IDs GPU; manually installs driver; sees if both cards work. The answer is, generally, "no", so: Swear, remove one card, substitute, try again. Eventually I went to the IT department who gave me an elderly, huge, AMD card. 2 full length slots, 2 cooling fans, and a decade old so rubbish performance by 20-teens standards. But, 4 display outputs, and use any combination you want -- and native FOSS drivers, so no need to manually install anything. Joy, peace, and calm descended. Then a couple of months later, COVID... and working off a little Dell laptop with only an Intel onboard GPU and one external screen. I did in the end get 2 external screens and the built in screen working, but only using an X11 desktop that didn't do much fancy 3D rendering (Xfce) because it didn't have enough VRAM for triple-head and compositing.