G400, X.org, Dualhead

To get dual head working on a G400 with Fedora Core 2 and X.org, you need to do the following.

• download the latest linux drivers in source form from www.matrox.com
• install the src RPM for x.org.
• unpack the matrox drivers and copy the mgaHALlib.a file to /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES
• modify the xorg SPEC file as per this posting: Note that I didn't change the version number of x.org, but instead added "_mga" to it and I had better success.
• follow the other steps above; i.e. recompile the RPM and update your installed version with rpm -Fvh ...
• download the binary linux drivers from Matrox and install them. I had already done this, so I knew that the libraries were all in the right places.
• Restart X

That should do it, assuming that you have a properly setup xorg.conf, of course.

Fedora Core 2 should come with a warning: Serious Geeking required to get this to work.

Oh, and if you're using PostgresQL for anything, make sure that you have a dump of your database using pg_dump first, before you find yourself trying to uninstall postgres at 1 AM and reinstall the older version so that your website and spam filtering systems actually work.

Honestly, if it is known that a paritcular upgrade will require backing out of that upgrade so that you can make the requisite backups to complete the update, I think that the installer should abort with a message telling you that you'll have to dump your databases using pg_dump before upgrading rather than giving you a cryptic error message at boot and leaving you to figure it out yourself. Hunting around for the previous OS install disks so that you can install the older package so that your entire production systems still work is not a great deal of fun. Especially not at 1 AM.