[ale] Is ATI Linux compatibility good?

Björn Gustafsson bg-ale at bjorng.net
Sat Mar 27 13:00:49 EDT 2010


I'm still working on building my desktop system, and now I think that
ATI video sounds like a good idea.

Do the newer distros work well with ATI video cards?  Which ones have
you tried?  Do you use the advanced effects?

Any insights would be appreciated.

On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 12:17 PM, Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us> wrote:
> On 03/27/2010 10:13 AM, William Fragakis wrote:
>> The proprietary nvidia drivers have been a thorn in my side, too. From
>> what I can gather, it installs its own versions of opengl libraries
>> which then wrecks the intel video ability to do on my thin clients (ie
>> compiz). Trying to run either the nv or nouveau drivers means the thin
>> clients now work splendidly but the server has a useless desktop. As
>> it's attached to a nice 22" lcd, that's a total waste.
>>
>> Time to chuck these cards on ebay and get some ATIs.
>
> Let us know what chipsets you get and how well things work on whatever
> distro/version/driver combination, if you could please.  That would be
> awesome.
>
> I know that I had to use the proprietary driver on my laptop while I was
> running Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10), but on Lucid (Ubuntu 10.04-to-be) it works
> excellently with free software.  It is kind of nice to be running
> software that I can at least debug if the need arises.  That's been my
> only problem with NVIDIA.  And it wasn't that bad back when they were
> responsive to bug reports.  However, it seems that these days, you send
> them a bug report with their proprietary driver and it winds up going
> into a black hole somewhere, never to be answered.
>
>        --- Mike

-- 
Björn Gustafsson



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