386SX wrote on 2021-02-05, 10:05:

Thanks for the hints. I'm waiting for some capacitors to arrive cause I've noticed the board being unstable with Pentium D supported cpus and then I'll try as suggested to install if at least I could use lubuntu 18 or 16.04.x. But about ArchLinux and Slackware, would they support the installation of that DRI driver easily by default?
It sound cool to still use such known brand gpus into a "modern" machine. I'd buy one of those latest PCI-EX S3 cards just to see them running at their best. In Windows ME this iGPU wasn't bad at all as said for a retrogamer let's say running DX6/7 games.

Or you can try something like Debian, which is about as widely supported as it could be. The problem isn't with the card per-se as much as the lack of official driver support efforts. You can try to compile the older code against modern kernel/userland and see if it'll build with DRI support, but chances are, the mainline Linux distribution maintainers either tried and couldn't, or realized that it needs some serious work and they don't feel that there are good returns on the time investment.

S3 never released any substantial information about the GPU internals but used a closed source binary blob + open source code shims to implement drivers, and when API changes occur during the past 10 years no one from Via/S3 contributed any updates to accomodate those changes (they have been a shell company for the past 10 years, likely with no staffing and seen as a patent portfolio holder). There are also almost no real interest to reverse engineer those GPUs (well, OpenChrome...kinda) to bypass the binary blobs/shims. It's nearly the same situation with nVidia (who did not release API specs but at least continued to release and support closed source drivers) and nouveau (which is based on reverse engineering and community support).

386SX wrote on 2021-02-05, 10:05:

Thanks for the hints. I'm waiting for some capacitors to arrive cause I've noticed the board being unstable with Pentium D supported cpus and then I'll try as suggested to install if at least I could use lubuntu 18 or 16.04.x. But about ArchLinux and Slackware, would they support the installation of that DRI driver easily by default?
It sound cool to still use such known brand gpus into a "modern" machine. I'd buy one of those latest PCI-EX S3 cards just to see them running at their best. In Windows ME this iGPU wasn't bad at all as said for a retrogamer let's say running DX6/7 games.

Maybe its drawing too much current.
Pentium D is really power hungry.

matze79 wrote on 2021-02-07, 13:15:

386SX wrote on 2021-02-05, 10:05:

Thanks for the hints. I'm waiting for some capacitors to arrive cause I've noticed the board being unstable with Pentium D supported cpus and then I'll try as suggested to install if at least I could use lubuntu 18 or 16.04.x. But about ArchLinux and Slackware, would they support the installation of that DRI driver easily by default?
It sound cool to still use such known brand gpus into a "modern" machine. I'd buy one of those latest PCI-EX S3 cards just to see them running at their best. In Windows ME this iGPU wasn't bad at all as said for a retrogamer let's say running DX6/7 games.

Maybe its drawing too much current.
Pentium D is really power hungry.

I thought the same thing but they all are supported up to the Pentium D 960 version if I remember correctly and the PSU is a Prescott Ready Enermax still working fine. The point that both USBs and on-board audio doesn't seem to work even if installed both in Win ME and linux make me think something is wrong on the pcb side. I don't see broken components or capacitors so I suppose maybe some capacitors are gone without leaked acid or something. Similar thing happened other times with other capacitors. So I desoldered the cpu voltage regulator ones (the biggest 3300uF) and ordered some new of these and I'll change also the 1000uF ones that are close to the USB and audio ports. It might not change a lot but it's worth to try.

Did you manage to get the iGPU working properly on a new distro?

I've been testing older distros and the newest one I tried on which it works out of the box is Debian Squeeze.

You get 2D/3D/XV/MPEG2 support and the system UI feels overall snappy. I couldn't get xmvc to work with mplayer, even though it's loaded by X.Org, but mpeg4 (xvid) videos play smoothly, even if the CPU does work intensely.