On Wed, 2001-11-14 at 11:36, Arlen Carlson wrote:
> Hmm! I'd be very surprised if it wasn't the reverse situation...In general
> cards that work under 3.x will work under 4.x, but not the other way around.
> As an example, I believe there are some newer Nvidia-based cards that require
> 4.x, and will not work under 3.x.
Well prepare to be surprised. The laptop in question, which the poster
mentions, is some years old and uses a fairly unusual Cirrus Logic
LCD-only graphics card. This is all quite well documented in the
XFree86 package.
Support using the XFree86 3.3.6 XF86_SVGA xserver is noticeably better
than with the XFree86 4.x.x xservers. I think it highly unlikely that
this model will ever be supported by v4 unless someone very altruistic
finds a way of re-supporting all these sorts of old cards.
There are actually quite a few old cards which are not well-supported by
XFree86 4.x, and that seems pretty reasonable too, when you take the
word 'old' into the equation.
I had one of these laptops (still do, but it isn't my main system any
longer). It should operate fine with XFree86 4.x, but using the
xserver-svga package (which is version 3.3.6) from unstable worked fine
for me (currently 3.3.6-39). Debian supports concurrent or mixed
installation of 3.3.6 and 4.x, and I expect will continue to do for some
time for exactly this reason.
The X protocol hasn't changed so much that the XServer is incompatible
with the X clients - you just lose some of the snazzier functionality
that the v4 XServer implements, such as truetype font support. OTOH TT
fonts are available with a font-server anyway.
Hope this is some help,
Andrew.
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