Advanced

Linux Consumers Should Still Avoid S3 Graphics

Posted by bob on · 7 comments
Phoronix		Mail this story
Print this story

Whenever writing about VIA Technologies on Phoronix, S3 Graphics always comes to mind due to its relations with HTC and VIA. In fact, it's the only time that S3 Graphics usually ever comes to my mind aside from when talking about S3 Texture Compression. Anyhow, after writing this morning about the VIA KMS driver still not being mainline, it's worth reminding uninformed Linux users that S3 Graphics products remain poorly supported under Linux...

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Groups: Linux; Story Type: News Story

» Get new stories by e-mail: nightly or as they are published

« Return to the newswire homepage

  Related stories
» More like this

Comments (7)

helios ·
SIS motherboards have always been a challenge on which to install Linux. We were donated 2 dozen Fujitsu notbooks a couple of years ago and I think we tried somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 distros...none of them would install. The majority of them would not even boot. PCLinuxOS was the closest we came to a booted live system but the graphics froze three seconds after the login screen and that was at 256 colors at the lowest resolution possible. We ended up selling them on our ebay store for operating funds.

Thankfully, we run into fewer and fewer SIS systems these days and the main player for these motherboards seemed to be Fujitsu.
caitlyn ·
Quoting:notbooks
Was that deliberate or a type which ended up expressing your frustration, Ken?

I still have a circa 2001Toshiba Libretto L1 (600MHz Transmeta Crusoe, 384MB RAM) which still runs decently with a lightweight Linux distro. It has an S3 Savage IX graphics chipset and that actually works well and has always been pretty well supported. My only complaint is that under Windows ME (the factory OS) it supported 1600x1200 resolution. That was also true back in the day when XFree86 was the standard X implementation. Under X.org, for a long time, I could only get 1280x1024 out of it under Linux. With the latest SalixOS I actually can get the full supported resolution again.

The point is that once upon a time there were S3 drivers that worked and then X regressed for a very long time.
jdixon ·
> The point is that once upon a time there were S3 drivers that worked and then X regressed for a very long time.

Yes. We had an S3 motherboard at one time, and it worked well.
helios ·
notbooks = they suck
caitlyn ·
Quoting:notbooks = they suck
I've never had a Fujitsu so I sure won't be arguing with you :)
gus3 ·
I like my not(e)book. In fact, I'm using it right now.
Fettoosh ·
I am on travel and my wife has a work Toshiba NB205. I installed Linux on it and works great. Unfortunately, she needs Windows for work related and I have to use it.

She also has an iPad. But until tablets acquire and can run standard office apps., Netbooks are still much better when traveling.

Post a comment

A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.

Your message:
|||||
10
Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, [text](https://link), - lists, > quotes, $x^2$ for math. Formatting help

Sign up and post (it is free)  or  Log in and post