I bought 3 Rackable Systems servers.  Turns out they have the ATI Rage XL graphics chip on the motherboard.  This is a problem because with Ubuntu there seems to be no easy way to get anything better than 800 by 600 display resolution.  As I am trying to use one of the boxes to learn about Ubuntu / Apache / MySQL / PHP this is a problem.   I did alot of diddling with the xorg.conf file to no avail.

While booting up and during shut-down the screen resolution was too high

The motherboard is a Tyan S2735-8M.

The long pci slots are:   64-bit 133/100/66MHz (3.3V) PCI-X slots

I found this riser card on ebay.  I am going to buy it and try putting a different video card in the server to facillitate development!

Looks like this guy had the same problem with a server with the same Rage XL graphics chip.

Slot keying diagram from wikipedia – My server card has 64 bit PCIx Universal slot.  The left portion of this slot is identical to a 3.3V 32 bit PCI slot.  Will a standard 32 bit PCI video card work in the 64 bit universal??

  • Will PCI work in a PCI-X slot?
  • PCIx exposed – PCI-X is downward compatible to PCI. If a PCI card is inserted into a PCI-X system the system will drop down to PCI level operations. It will not execute PCI-X based operations. Thus, to take advantage of PCI, engineers will have to rely only on PCI-X cards and boards.

Nvidia Driver model support list – Ubuntu Nvidia driver howto

 

UpDate January 30,2009

Having been driven half bonkers by 800×600 resolution I stopped by Fry’s electronics and found they still sell a particular model of old fashioned PCI video cards.  The brand is BFG and the model is 6200 OC. It is based on a nVidia chip.  It took a while but now I have 1900×1200 resolution and about creamed myself when I saw it come up.  I used the Envy tool.  I tried the lastest version but that did not work.  I tried again with the next to latest and that worked.  It appears to not have used the proprietary driver. 

Categories: Linux

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