[clug] Head up for those thinking of Ubunty Jaunty with older ATI cards

[Steve McInerney]

Can't talk to the older cards, but the evil propriety ATI drivers that can be
installed via Jaunty cause xorg to leak memory like a sieve. 1.3Gb RSS was the
worst I've noticed it gobble.
I was getting about 1 - 1.5 days stable between reboots - eventually X would
... not stop, but have to be pushed to repaint the various windows.

Ended up getting sick of that and switched to an older ('06) nvidia card...
which isn't recognised as 3D capable. Sigh.
/me wantz my compiz!


As Robert mentioned, PPA's are pretty cool. Anyone can have one if they so
desire. Quite a few of the Ubuntu Dev's use them to get suckers^W volunteers
to trial beta builds.
eg Luke aka TheMuso with his pulse-audio updates.
https://edge.launchpad.net/~themuso/+archive/ppa

I personally, principally use the bzr ppa's:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bzr/ubuntu jaunty main #BZR PPA
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bzr-beta-ppa/ubuntu jaunty main #BZR Beta PPA

for example; to get the latest and greatest bzr versions.


ISTR that the kubuntu folks use PPA's to push the latest and greatest KDE apps
as well.


Cheers!
- Steve


on 28/04/09 01:16 Andrew Janke said the following:
> Hi all,
> 
> If you plan on going to Ubuntu Jaunty and have an older ATI card that
> uses the Radeon driver be sure to take a read of these:
> 
>    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati/+bug/363238
>    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati/+bug/365886
> 
> Otherwise you might just be left with the (somewhat wrong) impression
> that Jaunty is slow and jerky..
> 
> Seems that the default acceleration method changed from XAA to EXA in
> the radeon driver for the Jaunty release and not all cards like it
> that much. It is manifested as slow redraw/window moving/firefox
> scrolling/etc In my case the times reported by gtkperf halved when
> switching back to XAA.
> 
> My machine: T42 Thinkpad with a ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility
> Radeon 9600 M10]
> 
> 
> --
> Andrew Janke
> (a.janke at gmail.com || http://a.janke.googlepages.com/)
> Canberra->Australia    +61 (402) 700 883