On Thu, 2022-01-06 at 09:40 -0400, George N. White III wrote:
[...]
Intel is no longer supporting cards that old.
A case of "planned obsolescence".
Or partly human obsolescence: the staff who wrote the original drivers are
no longer around and it doesn't make sense to train new people on hardware
that isn't generating new revenue. There have been proposal to force vendors
to release specifications when hardware reaches "end-of-support".so that users
can maintain old systems. This also applies to things like farm tractors.
My system is more than adequate for everything I need it to do: web surfing, email, videos, sys admin, a little development, etc. and nonetheless the CPU is no longer under supported. Oh well...
In my case, I try to "future proof" software I use by running it on "bleeding edge" OS (Fedora, Debian unstable)
and when practical, contributing patches to apps or libraries when stuff breaks.
I have a similar vintage system that is mainly used for data transfers from firewire and old memory card formats, so I may not encounter edge cases with graphics using a low-end (small fan) nvidia card and nouveau. There are probably lots of old graphics cards gathering dust -- you could try ebay or a local computer users group.
Thanks very much. It was hardware trouble and has been cured by the advice about "Tearing" in Archlinux.
Glad the community had a solution when the vendor did not. A lot of the software I use was originally
developed on CDC and SGI systems, so it very careful about memory management and efficiency, so
can run 100x faster on current hardware with as many parallel jobs (the workflows applied the same
calculation to 1000's of input files, so trivially parallel) as the mass storage can handle.