Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 67193
The 'nv' driver shipped with Red Hat Linux doesn't support DFP display types.
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:43:24 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.75 [en] (X11; U; SunOS 5.7 sun4u) Description of problem: Xconfigurator recognizes my Nvidia GEForce 3 card, but fails to mention that the DVI flat panel interface is not supported by the driver. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Purchase Dell computer with NVidia card. 2.Try to install RedHat 7.3 with monitor connected via DVI. 3.Bang head against wall trying to figure out why X won't work even though everything looked ok during installation. Actual Results: I experienced severe frustration until I (fortunately) finally found an email on some mailing list bulletin board from a developer at NVidia telling another user that the nv driver doesn't support DVI. Expected Results: Xconfigurator (or at least some documentation) should have warned me that the support for my card is not complete. Ideally it would suggest that I use the analog interface or get the driver from NVidia. I realize the pointer to the other driver is a bit much to ask, since RH must support billions of cards. Additional info:
Unfortunately, there is no way for _us_ to know wether or not a given driver supports DVI or any other feature for that matter. In order to know what features are supported by each piece of hardware, we would need to have every piece of hardware, and then go through the X source code completely every release to determine what features are available both in the hardware, and wether or not they are supported, and then actually test each feature to ensure it works. While that would be nice, it just is not feasible. There is no feasible way for us to provide users with this information ahead of time. The best way to know if something is supported, is to ask on xpert@xfree86.org, and to search the Internet. Sorry for any inconveniences you may have been caused by this. Hopefully in the future, video hardware manufacturers will more directly support Linux and will write drivers which support all of the features of their hardware.
*** Bug 70646 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Looks like NVidia DVI support will show up in XFree86 soon: http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/xpert/2002-May/017380.html http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/xpert/2002-May/017549.html
*** Bug 103955 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***