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Thursday, April 17th, 2008
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10:07p - Lazy day
I had the whole day off, which is nice coming after a Wednesday, but even better because after tomorrow I'll have nine solid days off. I'm eating up those leftover vacation days before the deadline.
So I puttered and read and messed around. Did clean the barns, did take Tess out to the pasture for a while, and did plant some seeds to get them started for the garden: tomatoes of various sorts, hot and sweet peppers, and some eggplants, which never do well but I'm perpetually hopeful.
There was a forecast of thunderstorms in the afternoon, which later were pushed off into the evening and now are down to a 60% chance of thunderstorms after 1 am tomorrow. The radar looks like they missed us completely and went off into central Wisconsin.
Swapped out the S3 Trio 64 video card in the Alpha to try an ELSA Gloria L/MX that I found. Thought it might work with Linux, which the S3 Trio doesn't do. Well, the ELSA doesn't work with Linux either, and doesn't work with VMS. This irritated me so I started experimenting.
These are older cards, and jolly well ought to have support. It turns out that the L/MX has an S3 ViRGE chip in it, which at least is supposed to be supported. Since Xorg replaced XFree86, it seems that X documentation and support has gone down the toilet. I started backing down versions of X. When I reached XFree86 version 3.3 the card started working properly. It may work in XFree 4 as well, since I never got that one fully installed. In Xorg 7.1 it doesn't work at all. The same is true for the S3 Trio 64, though now I need to swap cards again and see if that one also works in older versions of XFree86. I'm betting it does. So what's the excuse for breaking hardware drivers that used to work just fine? Just the "Oh, no one uses those old cards any more" excuse. Pretty lame. It turns out that lots of people use them if they are running older hardware, for lots of good reasons. The only cards that work with OpenVMS are old ones. And, unfortunately, the few that are compatible with both OpenVMS and Linux now have absurdly high prices. (Asking as high as $800 for a video card that was old in Y2K is just silly.)
current mood:  sleepy (comment on this)
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