[clug] ATI drivers and Ubuntu/linux in general

[Andrew Janke]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 00:45, Hal Ashburner <hal.ashburner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Andrew Janke wrote:
>>
>> The "ati" driver after all is the "old" one and we are all supposed to
>> be using fglrx for ATI stuff now.
>
> Really, did I miss a memo?
> My understanding was that fglrx drivers were the proprietary, stale, nasty,
> smelly, closed source, binary only, ati drivers that would do wicked things
> to kittens. Whereas the ati drivers were the lovely, fresh-smelling,
> wholesome, kind-to-animals-and-children, and deeply, deeply sexy GPL drivers
> that we were supposed to use.

Chortle...

I guess I was implying that according to ATI (the company) this is
what "we" are supposed to be using and liking. Suffice to say they do
not work for what I want but do at least work with the pointy-clicky
thing for one internal monitor and one external screen.  I think also
the Fn+F7 stuff works "better" under fglrx but then this is not that
important to me. So yes you are right, fglrx is still a big black box
that is supposed to "do stuff".

For now I will go back to attempting to compile the "feisty" version
of the ati/radeon driver with a hardy kernel/Xorg we shall see.  FWIW
the ati (well radeon driver in my case) still does have a few issues
with random lock-ups with no errors in syslog/dmesg that require a
power cycle but I can live with this.  generally it only happens when
I am on the youtube and not doing work in any case so at times it is
welcome. :)

Thanks for the info though.


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