Monday, May 21, 2007

i830 Update

Since my previous post about the intel X.org driver and the i830 chipset, Keith has fixed the remaining issues and as far as I can tell, everything is working as expected. Specifically, the load detection code now works and can see whether or not there's an external monitor connected, scaling of non-native panel modes work, and the output code does a better job of automatically assigning CRTC to outputs.

If anybody out there with i830 laptops wants to give this a spin, that'd be great. The master branch in the xf86-video-intel git repository should work out of the box, or you can try one of these RPMs, if you have at least a 1.3 X server:

http://people.redhat.com/krh/i830/

Once rawhide gets rolling again, we'll push it in there, and if everything goes well, phase out the old bios-based driver.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Testing cgit

Loading the gitweb.freedesktop.org front page takes about 10 seconds, and it annoys me whenever I load that page. I typically only load it once and then keep it open in a tab. This prompted me to set up a test of Lars Hjemli's cgit which is 1) written in C instead of that horrible language, and 2) has a built-in cache.

It's still pretty new, but it's come a long way in a short time, and has cool features such as a graphical diffstat. Try it out here: http://people.freedesktop.org/krh-cgi/cgit.

Saturday, May 5, 2007

Oh hi, I upgraded ur screenz

Old dogs can learn new tricks. In this case the dog is my old Thinkpad X30 laptop and the trick is dual head output:

I've wanted to use this configuration since I got the laptop 3 years ago. I could never get the BIOS based driver to set it up and the new native-modesetting driver didn't work on the Intel 830 chipset that the laptop has. But with a little snooping around in the BIOS and some help from keithp and anholt it's now working - yay! And we're one step closer to being able to use the native modesetting intel driver by default in Fedora.