SiS VGA Driver for Linux, taken from CDLinux 2008
The Driver works perfectly to play any videos
The Driver works good and recognizes the monitor maximum resoulutionLinux now has revolutionary grown into a modern operating system. Now, Linux has been used widely from web server, supercomputer into personal desktop, laptop, and even now, Linux has been very popular to be used in many tablet and smartphone devices. These radical changes indicates that Linux has grown into an ultimate operating system that has ultimate capability to handle any recent and most recent computer hardwares. This is of course a big deal for us to be celebrated.
But in one another rare case, I've found an ironic thing : Linux has left few old hardwares into more less usable hardwares. In my case, my old onboard SiS 661FX VGA controller, since the release of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, “hasn't ironically been maintained” to works as well as in the previous Linux releases. Since then, my SiS vga controller can't shows maximum monitor resolution although I know that there is still a SiS vga controller driver in the system. I really had no idea how to fix that suck thing till I've found one stupid way that magically worked. The way is I run any previous Linux release that still has good capability to handle my SiS vga. My purpose to do such thing is to generate and get the xorg.conf file configuration to be injected in the newer Linux release. And yes, my old SiS vga works well again by using the xorg.conf from the old Linux release.
I used that way to the next Linux releases and always worked well until the release of Ubuntu 11.04. I injected the xorg.conf file and after rebooting, the system can't load X. And so I google to look around what happened to the new Linux system in handling old SiS vga controller, and I got the fact that newer Xorg do not need any xorg.conf file anymore to work with any vga controllers. You just need to get the most appropriate driver of your vga controller and your vga will works good. And later I sought another more appropriate SiS vga driver and I've found some. In the last, I've found a driver at the launchpad called xserver-xorg-video-sismedia but after I installed the driver, I'd found a crappy thing : every I play video using gnome-mplayer and using X11 video output, the video runs very slowly. I had no idea so I rolled back into default SiS driver of the Ubuntu 11.04 release and although I couldn't get my maximum monitor resolution, I got maximum performance in playing videos.
I sought another driver and finally, I've got the most appropriate driver. I've found the driver in an old Chinese Live Linux distribution called CDLinux 2008. The driver works very good in my Ubuntu 11.10, almost perfect. I've got maximum monitor resolution and also I've got maximum performance when I play videos using Mplayer. So then, because of this good thing, I packed the driver into a DEB package and I store it in the internet so any user outside there who has the same old SiS vga controllers will get the most maximum performance with newest Linux releases. The driver can be downloaded HERE.
As usual, as a technical comparison, here is the system I used to test this :
OS : Xubuntu 11.10 kernel default 3.0
CPU : Intel Pentium IV 2,4 GHz
Memory : 1,5 GB RAM
VGA : Onboard SiS 661FX
Monitor : Acer AC711 CRT Monitor with max. resolution 1280x1024 pix.
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