I wrote MatroxFB in 1998 because of framebuffers were included into standard Linus's kernel and I was not satisfied with speed and capabilities of VesaFB driver included in kernel.
There is ongoing backport of 2.4.0 driver into 2.2.17 by Kurt Garloff. You can download patch for kernel 2.2.17-pre13 from ftp://platan.vc.cvut.cz/pub/linux/matrox-latest/dualhead-2.2.17-pre13.gz. This patch contains
If you want to use also output to television, you must download and compile matroxset. PAL 50Hz and NTSC 59.94Hz are supported, Composite and S-Video output.
Driver should currently works out of the box. There is still one unresolved issue:
matroxset contains two demoprograms, normal and swapped. First selects CRTC1 on first output and CRTC2 on second one. Swapped connects CRTC1 to secondary head and CRTC2 to primary head. You can use these programs if you need text mode or 8bpp mode on TV, as CRTC2 is incapable of these modes.
There is simple program which dumps Maven registers available at ftp://platan.vc.cvut.cz/pub/linux/matrox-latest/maven-prog.tgz which dumps (and/or sets) registers in Maven... (partial register description (updated Jan 24th, 2000))