Another Opinion Among Many

I’ve been having difficulty when installing the newest releases of some Linux distributions (okay, all of them).  What’s going on is that my ATI Radeon 9550 AGP seemed to have lost some important support.  Nobody seems to have addressed the issue properly and I do see that others were having the same problems that I had.  For no apparent reason, the screen would lock up hard.  It was as if there was a problem similar to what was happening years ago with my old ASUS P3B-F board, which I had to fix with some solder and a capacitor - not the usual fix.

I found that rolling back to an earlier version of x.org (the graphical interface for many Unix and Unix-like systems) fixed my problem.  So, I’ve been using Debian Etch (the stable branch) since.  I’ve had to add some back port repositories and search around for some software to compile from source so that I can have late enough versions of some things.  This has worked out alright for the time being.  But, I’m a software adventurer at heart, and I like to try what’s new.

Enter NVidia.  I’ve been watching for a decent deal on an NVidia graphics card for some time, as they actually produce drivers for Linux for all of their recent cards (all but a few really really old ones, actually, and the x.org drivers will work for them).  That time came this weekend.  For $10 and my ATI card, I have n NVidia GeForce 6600.  This card is actually quite a bit newer than the ATI card (by more than a year), so it’ll give me a bit more mileage as well.

So, the first thing that I did was to enable the right driver for it under dear old Debian, which worked well (I think that I used Automatix, or did I? Good beer).  The next thing that I did was to try OpenSUSE 10.3 to see how it worked with the card.  Wow!  No lockups! I have that distro on a separate hard drive, so I may throw it back in soon and try it for a tad longer to review it.

The next thing that i did was to back up a bunch of files that I had on the 16G drive that held PCLinuxOS and wipe it in favor of Kubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.  That seemed to work alright, booting me into a screen with the “nv” driver, which has no 3D acceleration but did boot me into 1024×768 at 85Hz, which is ideal for most CRT 17″ monitors like mine.  I enabled the restricted modules and got the proprietary driver for my card.  This caused my screen to go all wacky and I had to use the NVidia settings manager to set the card to the proper refresh rate.  Really, who uses 56Mhz? There seems to be something wrong with my user settings, though, as I cannot keep the settings.  I have to “zap” to the right refresh (which is easy, using CTRL+ALT+”+”), which is not ideal.  I’ll figure that out.  I created an account for each of the kids which do have the correct refresh rate.  I think that I’ll create myself another login and delete the original.  Maybe that’s the best idea.

I’m having a hard time getting used to KDE again.

I did learn something, though.  It seems that, like with SUSE, Debian now enables software suspend by default.  How did I find out this tidbit on my Desktop machine, you ask? It seems that I couldn’t boot back into Debian after installing Kubuntu, as it was looking for the suspend image on the swap partition on the Kubuntu (formerly PCLinuxOS) drive, which wasn’t there.  After logging into the Kubuntu desktop and searching around the internet, I found an obscure post on somne message board advising to try starting with the “noresume” switch on.  That meant adding the word “noresume” to the Kernel line in the GRUB boot list.  These incidents are why I became a champion of GRUB a long time before it was considered mainstream.  LILO is a thing of the past for me, and this problem is one of the biggest reasons.  I got booted into Debian to post this article as a result.  I messed with the /etc/fstab file to point to the proper swap partition, so that I can use the ones from both drives again.  We’ll see if I can reboot.

If you would, go join the 25,000+ petitioners who want decent Linux drivers written for their new ATI cards. I have. On a related note, if any Windows users out there who have an NVidia card that’s comparable to the Radeon 9500 Pro, who would like to trade, as they love ATI, I am willing to discuss it.

Windows+ATI=good

Linux+NVidia=good

I recently installed Sabayon Linux on one of my hard drives. The advantage of collecting old, unwanted computer parts is that you can sometimes end up with a few HDs out of the deal. They’re not going to be very large, of course, so that’s the drawback. I got into the myriad of applications and configurations possible and it became apparent that there’s a new breed of desktop on the horizon (Windows Vista has a hint of something new as well) that will not be constrained to 2 dimensions.

Sabayon is the first Live CD distribution of GNU/Linux to include AIGLX/XGL accelleration and the Beryl windowmanager, as well as the close-source proprietary drivers for the newer ATI and NVidia cards.

The rubbery, bouncy windows were cool to experience as was the “cube” desktop environment and the polish of the Sabayon project’s visuals was flawless. However, my Radeon 9500 Pro was detected and the proprietary ATI fglrx driver was loaded. Unfortunately, the proprietary driver is not compatible with the AIGLX accelleration, so the slower,memory-intensive XGL accelleration method was paired with it. I don’t know if this was an issue or not, but Beryl running with3D applications was flakey at best. I have other issues with Sabayon, but, as new user, I am going to give it a try and any strangeness that I find, I will report to the maintainers or forum for resolution, as this distro shows great promise.

When I was trying to troubleshoot my computer’s behavior, I came across quite a few HOWTO’s relating to Ubuntu, so I thought that I’d give Beryl a try on my Kubuntu installation, as there seemed to be a lot more out there in the search engine results regarding the use of AIGLX and Beryl on ATI cards.  I got DRI working fine with the  free Radeon driver in X.org 7.1 and followed a tutorial from the Ubuntu forum on enabling AIGLX and getting Beryl.  I must say that the claims seem to be true.  AIGLX is far more responsive and “lighter” than XGL.  I haven’t done any movies of the effects, but there are several YouTube videos on the things that Beryl can do.  Try this one.  Its pretty cool.