Running Linux, 5th Edition

Hardware Requirements

As of X.org Version 6.8.2, released in February 2005, the video chipsets listed in this section are supported. The documentation included with your video adapter should specify the chipset used. If you are in the market for a new video card, or are buying a new machine that comes with a video card, have the vendor find out exactly what the video card's make, model, and chipset are. This may require the vendor to call technical support on your behalf; vendors usually will be happy to do this. Many PC hardware vendors will state that the video card is a "standard SVGA card" that "should work" on your system. Explain that your software (mention Linux and X.org!) does not support all video chipsets and that you must have detailed information.

A good source for finding out whether your graphics board is supported and which X server it needs is http://www.x.org/X11R6.8.2/doc/RELNOTES3.html#9.

If you are unsure about which chipset you use, you can try to run

          Xorg -configure

This will examine your hardware and create an initial configuration file that you can then tweak according to your needs.

It should be noted that the X.org project instituted an entirely new driver architecture some time ago, which is much more flexible than the old one and will enable more timely support of new graphics hardware.

Video cards using a supported chipset are normally supported on all bus types, including the PCI and AGP.

All these chipsets are supported in 256-color mode, some are supported ...