Lost to history is the fact that XFree86 version 3 provided a different binary f... | Hacker News

Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit

		jeffbee on Aug 16, 2023 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Brand-new Linux release, which I'm calling the Deb... Lost to history is the fact that XFree86 version 3 provided a different binary for some families of graphics card. If you owned an S3 911 (a very common "Windows accelerator" at that time) you needed XF86_S3 but if you owned one of S3's execrable ViRGE 3D cards you needed XF86_S3V. Having a single server that contained or could load every driver did not come until version 4.

h2odragon on Aug 16, 2023 | [–]

> S3's execrable ViRGE 3D cards

twitch

clocks so bad the screen would swim at 1024x768.

sharts on Aug 16, 2023 | [–]

Dang, I haven't heard S3 ViRGE in so long. That thing was terrible. But that's all I could have at the time and seemed to work well enough.

As for those old "Win modems" back in the day...that's a different story.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact