Cheap video support of Linux boxes?

[Mark J. Dulcey]

Randall Hofland wrote:
> 
> What are the options for providing inexpensive video on a ATX board
> providing AGP, PCI and ISA support. I need some cheap video boards for
> servers that don't provide anything more than console support on a VGA
> or SVGA monitor (both preferred).

If you're just looking for text-mode support, just about any VGA card
will work. Buy the least expensive cards you can find, or go to the Flea
at MIT and pick up some cheap used ones.

If you want X Windows to work, your choices are a bit more constrained,
but not much. It's still true that most cards will work (and most of the
exceptions are expensive new cards and laptops, not older cards), though
this may change when the world moves to XFree86 4.0 (which will likely
abandon support for some of the older hardware, or at least relegate
them to VGA16).

I tend to have a preference for using AGP video cards, mostly because my
computers have an annoying tendency to run out of slots, and you can't
use the AGP slot for anything but video. But really cheap (i.e., under
$20) AGP cards are scarce.
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