DivX is My Friend

January 17, 2001

I found a really great Star Trek: The Next Generation DivX site; I've been grabbing episodes since last night. Check it out here. Speaking of DivX, the next generation of the DivX ;-) codec is available, but this time with source. See Project Mayo: OpenDivX for more information.

Pheh 0.2.1 is out. I've got v0.2.2 sitting here on my box; it's almost ready to go. The only problem is, I upgraded to the SGI GLU headers so compile the latest CVS Evas, and I must have gotten a broken snapshot, because now no GLU-related stuff works correctly. Oh well, I'll fix it soon enough. 0.2.2 adds webcam and native Cam bookmark support. I'm still working on sane keyboard support; I might hold off v0.2.2 until that is ready to go.

I've been having a horrendous time with kernel 2.4. Here's the problem; I've got a GeForce 2 MX TwinView and the KT133 chipset. Now, kernel 2.4 has KT133 AGP support via agpgart, and the NVidia driver has #ifdefs so it doesn't use it's own AGP support. So, in theory I _should_ be able to compile the kernel with KT133 agpgart support, reboot, and compile the NVidia drivers (which would exclude it's own AGP driver). Alternatively, I could compile 2.4 without agpgart, and compile the NVidia driver, which would use it's own (working) KT133 support. Fortunately for me neither of those two options works; I get a hard lock after my ssh-agent dialog closes. Before you ask, yes I've applied the linux-2.4.0-PR patch; 0.9-5 won't compile under 2.4 without it. I've also tried the TNT2 M64 POST patch (someone in #nvidia thought it might help), and various other crap. The only thing I haven't tried yet is upgrading from XFree86 4.0.1 to 4.0.2. At this point, I suspect that may be the problem, but I'm sticking with 2.2 for the time being.

On a more positive note, I tried out both SVGATextMode (132x60) and fbcon. Wow! FBCon looks great -- totally smooth fonts in console; absolutely amazing -- but it's a bit on the slow side. I like SVGATextMode a bit more at the moment. It's not noticeably slower, but there's a _ton_ of console space. I actually felt a bit cramped once I got back into X.

Finally, I've heard rumors about the new Nvidia Linux drivers having multihead or even xinerama GL support. Needless to say, I've been checking the page about 1000 times a day waiting for it to come out. Then again, the drivers were supposed to come out before christmas, so who knows...