It seems that Guidance doesn't list the via driver at all - the
GfxCardModelDB object contains a hard-coded list of drivers, and the via
driver (and several others) are not listed there. The displayconfig
frontend has information about the via driver in its own information.py
file, but it only uses that to improve the info provided by Guidance.
And displayconfig really only displays the drivers listed by Guidance,
even if information.py contains more drivers.

Thing is, displayconfig should in fact display the list of drivers that are 
actually installed on the system. An Xorg installation only supports a certain 
set of drivers (that is: you can only specify certain driver names in the 
xorg.conf - unknown driver names are rejected). So displayconfig should only 
list these drivers.
Per default, Ubuntu installs all xserver-xorg-video-* packages, so 
displayconfig would offer lots of drivers to choose from. But if we don't have 
a via driver installed (ie. package xserver-xorg-video-via is not installed), 
the via driver would indeed not be listed in displayconfig.
That would also shift the question of "should some obscure 'ast' driver be 
included?" to the packagers :-) because then if an Ubuntu release ships and 
installs the package for some obscure driver, displayconfig will duly offer it. 
Btw. I only mentioned the "ast" driver because it was the first in the 
information.py list that was not provided by Guidance :-) so nothing special 
about it.

The "only" difficult thing is to get the list of available drivers from xorg... 
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/ has the available modules, but I think the 
actual driver names are embedded in the .so files. Maybe there's an official 
way to ask xorg for that info?
Another way would be that the xserver-xorg-video-* packages install some 
metadata files that list the actual driver name(s) provided by the package. 
Maybe that would also make it possible to move the info from Guidance's Cards+ 
file into this metadata: every driver package could announce there what models 
it actually supports. Installing a new driver package would automatically 
extend the driver list and the vendor/model list in displayconfig.

If all that is too big, I think the Guidance driver list should be
changed to match the list of default-installed drivers. That would at
least hide the problem :-) in that displayconfig lists the "official"
drivers, and if you manually install a xserver-xorg-video-* package it
just doesn't show up in displayconfig.

-- 
driver list doesn't contain "via" driver
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/149793
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