I went to the local Sunday Computer Market a few weeks back, and let myself give in to the temptation of buying an “upgrade kit” for my desktop. I’d been starting to feel guilty about borrowing-back the computer I’d given to my in-laws, and the prices on the kits at the market seemed really good.
I subbed in a slightly more expensive motherboard, and when it came to the graphics card the one they offered had less RAM than I’d have liked (having had the black-window problem in Compiz/Beryl) but the next one up they had was nearly double the price. I didn’t even think about the chipset while I was there.
In fact I didn’t even think about it until I got home, and sure enough found that the card was an ATI. Nevertheless, I threw it all together, thinking “oh well, surely the driver support must have improved since I last used an ATI card…”
W R O N G.
The new kit went in underneath my existing Kubuntu Feisty install, which had Compiz running acceptably on a moderately-recent Nvidia card. First thing I had trouble with was the right options to get Compiz going again: I went straight for the ATI binary driver, but then backed out to the Xorg Radeon driver because MythTV wouldn’t work right (the ATI driver doesn’t support video overlays in acceleration mode, or something). I ended up having to ditch Compiz altogether because it was just really really unstable.
So I’d lost my eye candy, but had TV. Then, I wanted to look at FlightGear (the FOSS flight simulator)… I was getting about 3spf (yes, that’s seconds per frame, not frames per second) in the game… Grr. The Xorg ATI driver has no 3D acceleration support!
By this time, I had blown about a week of whatever spare-time I might have had trying to get the ATI card working properly — and it still wasn’t. Not only that, but it couldn’t: the configs needed to support the apps I want to run are mutually-exclusive. So I spat the dummy, and went to the local PC-bits shop and bought an Nvidia card.
Threw it in there, chucked the Nvidia binary driver at it, and it Just Worked. MythTV: perfect. FlightGear: brilliant.
Compiz is a different story though, as it still is dodgy on the new Nvidia card[1]. Might be a bug that’s unrelated to the graphics driver — odd that it only showed up when I put the ATI card in though.
Anyway, I’ve got an ATI X550 based PCIe video card here, going cheap… 🙂
[1] The first version of this blog post was lost to a Compiz-induced X crash… While I was typing, I thought “hmm, now that I’ve got the Nvidia card working and things are stable, I should try Compiz again, so that I can blog it”. Hint: when trying something that has killed X in the past, don’t do so with unsaved work in your desktop…
Crossed Wires 