In my workstation I still operate a Matrox G400 back from 1999. It was a state of the art graphics card for its time, and especially well supported under Linux/XFree86. Well, time went on and now everybody's using X.org. Since two days ago, my workstation joined the club, finally having been
updated to etch. And then I find a discussion in the Usenet group de.comp.os.unix.linux.hardware with somebody complaining about a freezing system with X.org/mga when switching to the framebuffer console. And of course, I can easily reproduce it: Switching back to X immediately hang the system. Suspend to disk hangs up the system, too. Great.
A little bit of searching quickly revealed this horrible
list of bugs for xserver-xorg-video-mga in Debian, from which one bug in particular links to
this upstream bug entry. See the date of the last change to this bug? It's almost three years old! I am now trying with "UseFBDev" set to "false" and at least I could switch three times back and forth, but we will see.
Debian just published an update to their stable distribution etch dubbed etch-and-a-half. The big news here for everyone not accustomed with Debians release cycle anyway is that it's the first time that it's not only a point release that fixes security is
Tracked: Jul 31, 16:45