Getting an old Matrox video card to work in CentOS 7

General support questions
Post Reply
phil.e
Posts: 97
Joined: 2018/02/13 20:28:14

Getting an old Matrox video card to work in CentOS 7

Post by phil.e » 2021/10/19 22:02:02

I'm trying to get an older Matrox video card working in CentOS 7.9. The card model is M9138. The most recent Linux 64 bit video driver on the Matrox website is from 2015. The PC model is a Dell 9020 Optiplex.

When running the video driver, I'm getting an error "ERROR: Xorg 6.9, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, or xserver 1.9, 1.10, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13, 1.14, or 1.15 not found. Please update Xorg"

The Xorg version installed is 1.20.

Without a good video driver, I can only get one screen to come up (it's a 3 head card) and will only do a 1024 x 768 video resolution on the one screen.

Is there a work around or a 3rd party driver that can be used to get this video card working correctly?

Thanks,

User avatar
TrevorH
Site Admin
Posts: 33202
Joined: 2009/09/24 10:40:56
Location: Brighton, UK

Re: Getting an old Matrox video card to work in CentOS 7

Post by TrevorH » 2021/10/20 00:20:05

What is the output from lspci -nn | grep -i vga
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

phil.e
Posts: 97
Joined: 2018/02/13 20:28:14

Re: Getting an old Matrox video card to work in CentOS 7

Post by phil.e » 2021/10/20 15:34:31

Here's the output

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Matrox Electronics System Ltd. M91xx [102b:0540] (rev 01)

User avatar
TrevorH
Site Admin
Posts: 33202
Joined: 2009/09/24 10:40:56
Location: Brighton, UK

Re: Getting an old Matrox video card to work in CentOS 7

Post by TrevorH » 2021/10/20 17:07:22

Apparently no current system supports that card. I checked on CentOS 7, 8 and Fedora 34 and on all of them, the command grep -i 102b /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/modules.* | grep -i 0540 returns no output at all which means that no module claims to support that PCI vendor:device id

The errors you got complaining that you needed to "update" xorg or xserver are lying. It's the other way around, the version of X on all of these is too NEW to support the driver you are trying to use. You would need to rebuild the driver you got from the Matrox website against the current version of X to make it work (and that might need code changes). You would need the source to do that.

There are several Matrox cards supported on all of those systems, running modinfo mgag200 will show you a list of the PCI ids supported but the highest device id listed there is 0538. Apparently the newer M91xx cards use a different kernel module so it's not mgag200 that you would need. However, if you google around you can find posts quoting Matrox support as saying that the driver you downloaded and tried to use is the latest and will only support the X versions it lists. If you have anything newer you are out of luck. That seems to mean that you would only get this to work by downgrading your entire system to one of the supported X versions - and in all probability that means using CentOS 6 or even 5 which have been EOL for 1 year and 4 years respectively so really are not choices at all.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

phil.e
Posts: 97
Joined: 2018/02/13 20:28:14

Re: Getting an old Matrox video card to work in CentOS 7

Post by phil.e » 2021/10/20 17:41:18

Yeah, I understood that my xorg was too new for what they wanted - that was a given.

Thanks for the feedback. Dozens of these cards were found on a shelf in storage - it would have saved a lot of money from not having to buy new cards if they could be made to work, but if they're really obsolete, it's beating a dead horse.

Post Reply