| [ | Tags | | | 2-d, 3-d, ati, free drivers, geforce, graphics, hangvidia, hardware, hardware log, hd 2600, hd 2600 pro, linux, log, nvidia, opengl, radeon, radeonhd | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Home | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | productive | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Mika - Love Today | ] |
Up until this Saturday, my Linux workstation had an old Nvidia
GeForce 4 MX card, whose fan recently died. We decided to upgrade the card,
and I told my father that an ATI card would be preferable over Nvidia,
because AMD/ATI are more FOSS-friendly and released SPECs. So he bought an
ATI HD 2600 Pro card. It's r600, but quite low-end (but still not as much
as the GeForce 4.).
We delayed installing it, but this Saturday, after I had to reboot after the
new kernel update, we got to it. The hardware replacement went surprisingly
well, and then we booted the computer. Everything went well on startup,
and we got the login prompt. Then startx worked right away, as my
Mandriva Cooker installation detected the hardware change and set up all
the drivers accordingly. Mandriva++ .
Not everything worked flawlessly. I had to edit the xorg.conf file to re-add
the settings for the Xkb Hebrew keyboard, and to change the
Bits Per Pixel
from 16-bits to 24-bits. Then I was happy. I'm using the
RadeonHD open-source drivers,
which don't really do 3-D yet, but since there are SPECs for them, the
situation is expected to improve.
I'm so glad I've now escaped from Hang-vidia-land, and have a card from
a company that plays along with the open-source ideology. I hope to contribute
further to the open-source drivers by reading the SPECs and writing code,
and hopefully I would be able to understand what I need to do better than
with Nouveau. In any case,
since I'm not obsessed with "gamer" computer games and am not using the
high-performance 3-D/2-D effects in much, I can survive just fine using
the non-3-D enabled drivers. (Just as I used the "nv" driver before the
upgrade.).
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