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Thanks for all the comments. Its nice to know that I'm not the only one who suffers from the pains of X (even if they are indirectly through 3rd Party), however the "straw poll" does I think show a gap that needs to be plugged before linux becomes a "consumer" product. Having tried to compile the drivers for a Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 last night on a RH8.0 box which uses gcc 3. It seems that the drivers supplied by powervr will compile however due to the use of static objects pre-compiled under gcc 2 this leads to an incompatibility problem when the driver is loaded with modprobe / insmod. The solution seems to be to either load a version of gcc 2 and recompile the kernel, or load the kernel source on a machine with gcc 2 compile it and transport it back to the RH8.0 machine. Both methods have their problems, require the user to have two different versions of linux, and would frankly put off your average computer user (thats me by the way). True, the user in question can use his graphics card in a VESA compatible mode without acceleration and it works, but is this the point ? If I bought a product that can do X,Y,Z, I would be annoyed if I could only do X and Y in one senario but do X,Y and Z in another, and would probably stick with the scenario where I could choose to do all three. Alternatively you can try to put pressure on the hardware vendor to recompile his static objects or better still release the drivers in source form, which would allow many different distributions to utilise the card (level playing field). But again it seems that some manufacturers are only interested in the "main stream", even if it meant in reality they could benefit from improved drivers by opening up the source. I don't tend to play games, I more interested in Office Applications / Education Software, but even so acceleration features can improve performace on standard desktop and as for mutli-media apps its more or less essential. Oh Well M$ wins again........ Tom. Information in this message is confidential and may be legally privileged. It is the intended solely for the person ( or persons) to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender, and please delete the message from your system immediately. The views in this message are personal, they are not necessarily those of Torbay Council. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.