Cheap Video Cards

[mikebw at colossus.bilow.com (Mike Bilow)]

Text mode should require NO configuration.  You can, if you want, put the
card into high-res text mode if the card has enough memory and the monitor
will support this.  The purpose of doing so is to get more lines of stuff
on the screen, such as a 43- or 50-line display.  Some cards can also do
more columns, up to 132.

Text mode is configured by a kernel parameter at boot time.  If you are
using Lilo, you can specify this in an "append" directive.  Sending
"vga=ask" to the kernel as a boot parameter will make it prompt for a
choice of video mode; this lets you experiment.

If you want X Windows, that is a different matter and there could be
substantial effort in configuring the card support.

We still have one Linux server with a Hercules Monochrome (MDA) card and
an amber monitor.  The monitor case is yellowing with age, but we leave it
there because it runs without trouble for hundreds of days at a time (with
the monitor powered off, obviously) in a rack with Windows NT machines
which have to be rebooted twice a week.  I think this is funny.

-- Mike


On 2000-07-07 at 20:42 -0400, Randall Hofland wrote:

> OK, so any cheap card will do. How difficult are ISA cards to
> configure???? I've used AGP in most of my Linux based servers but never
> tried an ISA or even a PCI card, although I just bought several PCI
> cards in hopes of using at least one in a dual monitor workstation (just
> like my PowerPC Mac).
> 
> If an ISA card will easily work in text mode for a VGA monitor, that
> will be fine.


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