XFree86, FreeBSD, the Matrox P650, and you
The new machine has a Matrox P650. The bad news is that XFree86 does not support this card natively. The good news is that Matrox provides a Linux driver. Even better, the driver works on FreeBSD. Thanks to Daniel Lang, I managed to get this working. Here's the procedure.
1. Get the driver from Matrox here. I used the Red Hat 7.3 one.
2. Unpack the driver (it's a shar file). Do not attempt to use the install program. Just unpack things.
3. Copy the driver from xfree86//mtx_drv.o into your modules directory. On my machine that was /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers.
4. Copy the sample XF86Config file of your choice from samples/ into /etc/X11/XF86Config.
5. Edit the file appropriately. By default, mine wanted to be in 1024x768 16-bit mode but it worked fine in 1600x1200 24-bit.
And then you're good to go. Actually, this was easier than the average X install because I didn't have to run the insanely useless XFree86 config program.
Now, it's true that unfortunately when you use the driver this way it's not accelerated, but seeing as the most advanced graphics stuff I do is Emacs and R, this isn't exactly a crisis for me.
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