Re: [ANNOUNCE] Incognito CD/USB 20070824.1 released

[Scott Bennett <bennett@xxxxxxxxxx>]

     On Tue, 18 Sep 2007 02:26:54 -0400 Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>
wrote:

>I've been absent the past few weeks, and it looks like the list has

     For being "absent", you have been very frequently helpful. :-)

>gotten very, er, exciting in that short time. I'll try to bring a bit
>more signal/noise ratio back to it now that I'm back.
>
>On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 01:01:20AM -0500, Scott Bennett wrote:
>> >Zitat von Ano Nymous <justiceftw@xxxxxxxxx>:
>> >> I hope this is the right place to ask this question. If not, please
>> >> point me to the right one!
>> 
>>      It definitely is not.  I would recommend not following up to this list,
>> but you and/or Mr. Hluchnik are welcome to email me directly.  A more
>> appropriate place would be one of the LINUX lists or one of the lists for X.org
>> or XFree86, as the case may be.
>
>[snip]
>
>> >> it looks like its a problem with the video card driver, maybe? which
>> >> is weird because incognito detects my video card correctly. it not
>> 
>>      What is "incognito" in this context?
>
>Incognito, in this context, is the subject of this thread that you
>are participating in:
>http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Sep-2007/threads.html#00037

     Thank you, Roger.  I'll take a look shortly.
>
>People who are rude have to be extra-careful to be both correct and
>useful; otherwise they just contribute to the problem. :(

     The rudeness has been discussed before, namely, the laziness of some
people on the list to post followups in the normally accepted format, which
preserves a sequential record of previous information.  Top-posting destroys
that record's time sequence and makes it difficult for readers joining a thread
to follow what has been going on.  Another rudeness exhibited on this list is
completely omitting the record completely when following up (not applicable
in the instant case, of course, because you've included the parts to which
you were responding).  That some readers dislike both the inconvenience and the
rudeness involved in causing the inconvenience may be expressed bluntly with
cause.
>
>As to whether user support for Incognito is on-topic for or-talk, let's
>find out whether Pat wants to deal with it here, and whether it's one
>user per month or hundreds.
>
     I interpreted the content of the original message in the thread as being
a question regarding driver support for a particular, though unidentified,
graphics card under X11 running on a LINUX system.  Incognito appeared to be
only an application whose request to X11 had failed due to X11's, or perhaps
the LINUX kernel's, failure to provide service to the graphics card.  It did
not appear, from the few messages included in the original posting, to be
related to any problem with Incognito itself.
     FWIW, I use FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE with X.org 6.9 and on occasion (grimacing
with distaste) Windows XP w/SP2.  My graphics card is a Mobility Radeon 9800
which apparently has the mobile version of the R420 chip.  AFAIK, all Radeon
cards have support under X.org as VESA devices, which can be used as a last
resort.  Radeon cards with model numbers above 9200 (R200-series GPUs)
generally have only 2-D acceleration using the radeon driver, though there is
apparently some experimental support for 3-D acceleration available for a few
old models with numbers slightly higher than 9200 (R300-series).  So I use the
radeon driver and get 2-D acceleration and 3-D support via the Pentium IV.  To
get this support under either LINUX or FreeBSD, the kernel must be generated
with the correct kernel driver, which the fglrx LINUX driver from ATi also
requires, and with the X11 driver (either radeon or fglrx) configured in
xorg.conf (or the equivalent for XFree86).
     Thus was the provenance of my diagnostic questions for the OP and the
author of the first followup.  I've been around some of these blocks already
and might well be able to help, but the or-talk list really doesn't seem to
be the place to proceed with that.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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