Diamond Stealth 2500 again

[LIH at cliffy.polaroid.com (Hsin-Yu Sidney Li)]

Hi,

This is a follow-up on my problem with the Diamond Stealth 2500 video
card from a few weeks ago.  Jerry Callen (jcallen at world.std.com)
wrote:

> >   There are more than two, and do not appear at any fixed location on
> >   the screen.  They disappear if one moves a window over them.  When I
> >   ran "ico -faces", a whole bunch of them appeared at the right of the
> >   ico window, approximately 0.5" to 1" long (not all of the same length,
> >   and the spacing was not regular).
> 
> This sounds exactly like a problem I had with a Diamond Speedstar Pro
> VLB card. In my case the lines were either all white or all black. Is
> that the case for you, too?

In almost all cases, they are all black.  *HOWEVER* I have also seen
other colors (e.g. cyan) show up.  It is probably not a coincidence
that this showed up after running some things on xterm, which I had
set to a cyan background.

> 
> The only way I could fix the problem was to specify "noaccel" (or
> something like that) in the XF86 server configuration file. Since I
> wasn't doing especially graphics-intense stuff, I never really
> noticed much performance degradation.

I tried the "noaccel" option, but the lines show up all the same; even
worse, the machine crashed and freezed up after I tried to run "ico
-faces" for a few minutes.  As a matter of fact, my earlier statement
that the problem was fixed was made too hastily.  Even with Alliance's
xfree driver (for the AT24 chip, which is used in the Diamond 2500),
with or without the "noaccel" option, the computer still
crashes/freezes up every now and then.  It isn't too frequent, and I
haven't lost any data as result, but it is certainly very annoying.

(An related incident that was also sort of annoying: when I told a
programmer friend of mine about the video card problem, his immediate
reponse was that I shouldn't fool around with Linux anymore, that it
was useless!  I didn't want to argue with him.)

As I mentioned before, every thing (including disk syncing) locks up
after the crashes, so I have no way of being 100% sure that the video
card is to blame.  But it certainly looks like it.

> 
> What is it with Diamond? I eventually replaced my VLB motherboard with
> a PCI board and got a Diamond S3-based (926?) card. It had this weird
> 8-pixel offset problem that was fixed by setting (cute...) the
> "diamond" option in the S3 server config file. Works like a champ, but
> it does seem that Diamond cards are subject to weirdness.
> 
> -- Jerry Callen
>    jcallen at world.std.com

For anybody thinking of getting a new video card (to use under Linux,
of course), I would suggest avoiding the Stealth Diamond 2500 card
till XFree 86 supports the card.  (I know that the 3.2A beta version
supports some of the AT24 functions, but it crashes on me all the
same).

Regards,

Sidney Li
lih at polaroid.com