I’ve been working sporadically on a computer project at home, one designed to provide a means of viewing video files (specifically digisubbed anime, but other files as well) on the 32” TV in the living room. Towards that end I’ve been fighting with the proprietary ATI Radeon drivers for Linux. Oh, I’ve sort of made them work, but they’re quirky and forgetful and a major PITA to work with.

This evening I was looking through my boxes for slide rails with which to mount the Livedrive bay unit into the machine in question when I came across an old piece of video hardware: My old Canopus Pure3D II. It’s a 3dfx Voodoo2 accelerator card from back before all video cards did 2D and 3D combined.

It also sports S-Video and composite outputs.

Turns out, it is also natively supported in modern Linux distributions. Well, isn’t that handy?

I dropped that critter into the chassis (along with the Livedrive, since the slide rails I needed were in the same box as the Canopus card) and, after surprisingly little futzing around, managed to generate signal out of the S-Video port. It took a few tries to find a screen resolution and refresh rate that would generate a useful signal, but even that only took up about twenty minutes.

On a side note, I also used apt to perform a massive upgrade on my Fedora Core 1 install. In this instance, the ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ command resulted in almost 150 package downloads. Wow.

Anyway, my next step is to see if I can manage 800×600 out of the S-Video port, and then I get to start setting up software. If all goes well, by this time next week I’ll have a working multimedia computer down in the living room. Excellent!