Linux Journal: Matrox G450 Dual Head

“Once upon a time Matrox graphics cards were marketed
to people building everything from value consumer desktops to
gaming rigs to high-end, PC-compatible workstations. Though even
Matrox’s fastest G-series has fallen far behind the competition in
terms of raw 3-D performance, thus losing the gaming and consumer
markets, they remain popular in the workstation market due to their
reputation for stability, high-quality visual output and excellent
Linux driver support. I will examine the Matrox G450 dual-head
video card, with regard to both the usefulness of dual monitors and
how well the G450 handles running two monitors. My test system is a
560MHz Pentium III supported by a 440BX chipset and 384MB of RAM
running Linux Mandrake 8.0 (kernel 2.4.4 and XFree86 4.0.3). My
video card is, of course, a Matrox G450 with one 360MHz RAMDAC, one
230MHz RAMDAC and 32MB of DDR RAM on board to drive two VGA
outputs.

Having found X to be a common source of issues in the past, I
wasn’t looking forward to configuring this setup. Much to my
surprise it was quite easy, with just one stumbling block–upon
installing the card, Mandrake incorrectly recognizes the G450 as a
G400. This isn’t a big deal as they are very similar cards. After I
had the card physically installed in the computer I went to
Matrox’s web site to download the latest drivers, choosing the
Matrox-authored but closed-source binary version. The binary
drivers are installed by simply dropping the two binaries into your
/usr/X11/lib/modules/drivers directory. Updating your X
configuration to reflect the new setup is similarly easy.”

Complete
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