Cards or Onboard Solutions for Sound and Graphics?
Novell Cool Solutions: Question & Answer
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Q:
Hello Stomfi, I am trying my hand with Linux SUSE 9.2 in a rebuilt computer. The motherboard is an ASUS P4R800-VM which has onboard graphics and sound (circa 2003). The motherboard CD has drivers for Linux; ASLA driver for audio, Linux_2D and XFree186 for chipset but I suspect not much for the graphics. Could you tell me please if the onboard sound and graphics can be made to work with SUSE or is a card the better way to go?
A:
From what you tell me I guess that Xfree86 is for the graphics chipset as XFree86 is the X windows part of your system. You'll be using Xorg on SUSE. Xorg took over the open source version from Xfree after some licensing issues. Whether the drivers will still work??? In any case, if you have an AGP slot or even a spare PCI slot you can get a nice inexpensive NVidia 3D card (there is a 32MB PCI version) and get the latest drivers from the NVidia site.
I suggest you load the live SUSE CD and watch the messages, or have a look in the system logs using YaST. Its in "Misc", and see if your hardware got recognised. Then you will know for certain if you need to replace any.
Cards will often be better than onboard solutions, as they can be more recent or higher performance, although the speed of the embedded bus can make a significant difference.
When you look at the size of a modern graphics card you can see that it would be hard to fit that sort of hardware onto a mother board, whereas it may be possible for sound hardware.
Have lots of fun. Stomfi
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