Trying to get your Matrox Parhelia card to work with Linux 2.6?
This patch should help. It mostly fixed things for me and I worked relatively happily with my Matrox Parhelia "P650" for about seven months. A few bugs remain -- eg quitting X renders the console unusable. My advice, though, would be to give up now, sell the card, buy a card from nVidia or ATI instead.
The reason for this is simple: Matrox don't give a damn about their Linux customers. At the time of writing the last driver update was over a year ago. Their binary-only driver is buggy, and they refuse to provide direct support for it -- they rely instead on the community to provide support. But they won't in turn support that community. They've released no documentation and updates are released at a truly glacial rate, with no indication of when the next update can be expected or what issues it will address. There are no drivers for non-i386 platforms -- anyone on Athlon64 (in 64-bit mode), PowerPC, ARM or any of the other exotic platforms Linux supports is out in the cold.
About 100 people a month have downloaded this driver patch since I posted it -- and those are just the people who investigated deep enough to find the patch (it's not easy to find!) and then knew what to do with it when they found it. For these people I leave my patch available. But the patch still has problems (eg, the console is unusable after quitting X on my machine) and they will only get worse as the Linux kernel deviates further from the one Matrox originally wrote their code for.
I've thrown my P650 away now. Not sold it, just chucked it out. I couldn't bring myself to lumber some poor sucker with that card. The card itself appears well built and the hardware has the ability to work very nicely, but the software drivers suck and blow at the same time.
I've previously used an HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon 9600 Dual DVI. Dual 1600x1200 DVI outputs, a 350MHz Radeon RV350 GPU, 256MB of 400MHz DDR memory, and most importantly: Open Source drivers. There are also binary-only drivers from ATI that make the 3D accelerator work, but for a 2D-only user like myself the Open Source drivers are perfect. Community support is good, the cards are very popular and ATI have an engineer with access to their internal documentation who writes and contributes fixes back into the Open Source drivers. It's not perfect (eg, full documentation for the RV350 core is not publicly available without signing an NDA) but it's better than what Matrox offer. To get both DVI outputs working well (I use two 1600x1200 DVI LCDs), use the latest release of the X.Org server. Unfortunately the hardware support for dual DVI on this card has been somewhat flakey, and I had at least one card where a voltage regulator overheated and literally desoldered components from the board.
Now I'm using an NVidia 6800GT with Dual-DVI outputs. The open-source "nv" driver can drive a single DVI output, but the binary-only "nvidia" driver can drive both. There is good support from Debian for packaging the binary-only drivers, and I have to say this is the nicest graphics card I've owned yet, and also the simplest to get working under Linux -- it took just a couple of hours to make it work perfectly. The stock fan on the card is a seriously loud little bugger, though, and needs replacing.
Still want to give it a go? Download the patch here, you crazy person!
Will, 2005-01-12.