[clug] ATI drivers and Ubuntu/linux in general

[Andrew Janke]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 17:08, Hal Ashburner <hal.ashburner at gmail.com> wrote:
> At the risk of sounding silly, pious and boring or something, why not
> compile the latest kernel.org kernel and if the bug persists, report it?

Sad to say but this has been reported in multiple places.
Unfortunately I doubt there is enough interest in it to get it fixed.
The "ati" driver after all is the "old" one and we are all supposed to
be using fglrx for ATI stuff now. In my case I just replace every ATI
I find with a intel/nvidia version. Call it ATI rage.

> iirc Dave Airlie who lives up the road in sydney "is _so_ not the
> maintainer" of the ati drivers yet seems to write code and fix bugs and what
> have you. Nice bloke too.

Interesting.

> Maybe a great sage in the ways of git could reveal how to run a the latest
> stable git kernel and roll back just one driver to a previous edition?

Now that would be nice, (I just need a sage), problem is I am a tad
scared of running with a bleeding edge kernel on a system that I like
to have "just work". There is a lot of nice HAL magic and the likes in
the ubuntu kernel+tools setup to the point that I just enjoy the
Ubuntu kool-aid and don't dabble with building custom kernels at all
these days.

There is nothing like arriving at some lab in the middle of nowhere,
installing ubuntu, adding an ssh key and then running cfengine to
update it with all the packages and local config that I need and
having it "just work" without having to stuff with video drivers and
the likes as per the Debian Sarge days...

As it is the amount of config I do is also slowly being whittled away,
take for example SGE (Sun Grid Engine) as of Feisty there are ports in
/etc/services already!  wheee! that's 8-10 less lines in cfagent.conf



-- 
Andrew Janke (a.janke at gmail.com || http://a.janke.googlepages.com/)
Canberra->Australia +61 (402) 700 883