pslog

the problem alerady starts when you try to install ubuntu. since ubuntu boots to an x-desktop (i’ve heard that, i never got that far with my parhelia) in order to start the installation, you’ll have to use the Alternate version of ubuntu. is specially compiled for garbage hardware like the parhelia card.
run the text mode installation and in stall it. there aren’t many options to choose from.

after the installation, the system will boot up and you will end up with a messed up display showing funy colorful screens. the bad news is, you don’t even get a console to work.

so when booting up your machine, you need to change your boot options. you can get to the boot menu by pressing escape after your bios screen disappears. but you have to be fast (so just keep hitting that button a thousand times and you’ll hit it at the right moment for sure)

select the first boot option and hit “e” then choose the longest line and hit “e” again. erase the last two words “quiet splash” and replace them by the word “single”. now hit enter and then “b”.
this will boot your machine in single user mode and it will show you text rather than the nice bootup screen your parhelia can’t handle.

after booting to single user mode, install ssh for remote access. therefore insert your install cd again and execute

apt-get install ssh

now wit another computer, navigate to the matrox page and download your driver. unfortunately you have to register and accept licences and all the stuff which makes it impossible to download the driver on a command prompt with wget and not even with links. so download it with another computer and upload it with scp (if your other computer is a windows computer, you can use winscp, it’s a free tool). in order to login with scp you need the root password which you don’t have, so on your single user booted ubuntu box type

passwd

and hit enter. now you have to enter your new root password twice.
if you don’t know your ip address you can check it with the command ifconfig -a
now that you’ve done that, copy the downloaded driver file to your ubuntu box. you can put it in a temporary place, so /tmp will be fine.

then get back to your ubuntu box and cd to the directory where you’ve stored the driver.
since we need to compile some things, you need to install the compiler and what belongs to it..

apt-get install build-essential

on an older version of ubuntu, you’d now simply run sh matroxdriver-x86_32-1.4.4-installer.run and you where done, but since the drivers are quite old already this doesn’t work anymore. it would complain that your x windows version isn’t supported anymore, allthough they claim in their release notes that it will run on any 6.something and up version.

this means, we have to modify the driver to accept our version of xorg. therefore, extract all the driver files but don’t run the installer yet. you can do this with the folowing command

sh matroxdriver-x86_32-1.4.4-installer.run --extract-only

it will ask you for a location to extract your files to. i’d put that into /usr/src/
it will make it’s own subdirectory there..

after the unpacking, cd to the directory it just created
edit install.sh
find the folowing lines:

        elif [ "$XVERSION" == "7.1.0" ]; then
            XPRESENT=1
            XVERSION="7.1.0"

hint: if you search for 7.1.0 it’s the first match

now replace

elif [ "$XVERSION" == "7.1.0" ]; then

with

elif [ "$XVERSION" == "7.1.1.0" ]; then

or whatever your xorg server’s version number is (if you don’t know the number just run

./install.sh

and it will tell you when it tells you that your x-server is too new
save the modification and now run the installer

./install.sh

now you need to modify your xorg config file in order to get all the displays runing. now this depends a lot on your screen setup. i user three display and since i have an old parhelia 128, it seems to only support the combined method.
you will find some examples in the samples directory of your installation directory and there are the release notes which also contain some informations on how to change the config file. however, you’ll have to try a bit since their documentation is even older than the driver so there are some inconsistencies it seems.

these are the essential changes for the combined tripple head desktop:

in the Module section, coment out all modules except for the ones you see below:

Section "Module"
        Load    "extmod"
        Load    "freetype"
        Load    "glx"
        Load    "type1"
        Load    "dbe"
EndSection

in the “device” section change the driver parameter to mtx

 Driver          "mtx"

and in the “screen” section add the folowing parameter (before the subsectoin, not inside the subsection)

        Option          "Triplehead"

now save all your settings and reboot your computer and you should see your x-desktop.
if there are some strangely shifted chunks on your screen, restart x by pressing ctrl + alt + backspace and they should go away.

hope that works for you