(English, Techstuff). One week ago, i just tried out the Fedro 12 Beta. There were some small issues, but one thing is just remarkable. The long time efforts, all the developer’s hack around, AMD’s release of hardware information and the development of Gallium3D seem to mature in last time. The first time we see free 3d rendering on noticable speed on non-Intel cards in Linux.
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(german, techstuff)
Da will man über einen KDE-Fehler schreiben, und während man dies tut findet man noch 3 weitere…
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Okay; now I had another stressy hours debugging ATI äähm AMD’s fglrx driver. I connected my TV using a HDMI cable to the graphics board and then used it for displaying videos. This worked so far, however I had to manually enable/disable it each time because when the TV was enabled the resolution was limited to 1920×1080 while the monitor supports just 1920×1200. Then I accidentally disabled the wrong Device (my Monitor). From this point it was not possible to reenable it again. The only solution was to manually plug off the TV and reboot the computer. When I plugged in the TV again it worked – for the current session. After rebooting the monitor was disabled again. Shit.

So I did updating the driver to version 9.9 – still no solution. Ubuntu is now displaying “Your system is running in low graphics mode” (when clicking cancel it successfull boots the fglrx enabled X11, so I think this is an Ubuntu bug).

Now I found the temporary solution to get it again to the starting point.

sudo cp /etc/amdpcsdb.default /etc/amdpcsdb
(overwring the ControlCenter’s settings). At least I can let my TV pluged in now.

There is of course no working composition with KDE because you cannot resize windows really (see this blog entry). I don’t care whether the bug lives in X.org or in ATI; if it would be in Xorg then ATI could just commit a bugfix. It’s not working on their driver only. For those who can live with slow-resizing: you don’t have full OpenGL during composition. That’s a real no-go.

If I would add together all these hours (and calculating these as working hours) I spent in debugging/using their useless drivers I could have bought a really expensive … nvidia.

By the way: This Qt labs blog post explains some problems with resizing in X11 generally, at least Qt seems to have some improvements which will be enabled with 4.6.

… unter ubuntu kann ja doch funktionieren; mal sehen wie lange. Wieso hat sich da eigentlich bisher (bis auf die überstromenden Bugreports) niemand groß aufgeregt, das wichtige Funktionen wie Desktopsuche nicht vonsicherheraus funktionieren und man dafür ein Java-Backend braucht? Bei der Konkurrenz ist es auch nicht besser, bei Gnome ist die Suche eines der ersten Dinge die man auf Grund von Performanceproblemen abschaltet. Einzig OSX scheint es richtig zu machen (Apfel-Tab eine tolle Abkürzung, die auf allen OS Standard werden sollte). Bei Windows weiß ich nicht, hab noch kein System mit vielen wichtigen Dateien gesehen, welches unter Vista liefe..

Vor einiger Zeit las ich einen Artikel, in dem der Autor mehrere Punkte feststellte, wieso Betriebssysteme sich eigentlich so verhalten wie sie tun. So gibt es etwa die Notwendigkeit, Nutzerdaten in Dateien zu speichern, weil der Speicher bekanntlich nicht-persistent ist. Der Artikel ist mir im Moment entfallen (wenn ihn jemand noch hat, bitte Bescheid sagen), jedoch fallen mir einige Punkte ein, die auch bei heutigen Betriebssystemen bis auf einige löbliche Ausnahmen bisher komplett ignoriert werden. Gerade im Schatten der Weiterentwicklung von Linux, Windows 7, OSX (insb. auf tragbaren Geräten), fallen diese noch all zu gerne unter den Tisch. Ausgerechnet die ominöse Internetwolke macht einige Punkte vor, aber sollten Programme die für uns woanders laufen nicht auch erst recht lokal laufen können?
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on the search of space in the net; where i could put a svn/git repository i found the prices for virtual servers heavily falling. 5gb + 500gb traffic / month for around 5€ seems possible now. there are even cheapier ones; but they don’t look too reputable. ideas what you could do with that
- install your own flickr (let other people go there with openID)
- sync all your stuff encrypted
let’s decentralize the web2.0 and i don’t know what makes people paying a lot of $$$ for spying sync space like apple mobile me or ubuntu one.

update
tex@blog.gauner.org describes a technique applying encfs on remote machines, maybe it’s compatible with unison.

mm, sometimes free software needs something like a marketing coach. the powerness of jabber is unchallenged, but if you want to bring it to your friends why
- is there no default client recommended on jabber.org? newbies really don’t care
- is pidgin talking of xmpp (yes i know, it’s the protocol, but how should newbies know?), why isn’t there a default server already written in? why comes there a stupid error code, if there is already a user with this username?
- does the syncronisation between kopete and pidgin leads to the case, that a user (pidgin) has the other one (kopete) multiple times in the contact list. if he removes one; the authorisation will be done undone, so the other one has to reask for it. just mysterious.

mm; just throwed away several hours by trying to fix fglrx drier on ubuntu intrepiod/amd64/ati hd4830. i made the error and installed it by the official amd website. of course it overwrite several ubuntu xorg files. while repairing all this i found out:

1. deleting an old fglrx
* delete all fglrx packages, if there are some (list them by dpkg -l | grep fglrx
* repairing x: sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
2. rewriting xorg.conf
dpkg-reconfigure xserver.xorg

then you can begin with reinstalling procedures documented quite often everywhere. if you get an error message, that depth of 8 is not supported; you have to add DefaultDepth 24 into the screen section of xorg.conf.

one word to fglrx driver quality: when you ever thought, that the nvidia linux driver is bad; because it misses some 2d acceleration feautures (don't tell they are fixed with 180.*, there still are some) they are still much better than this fglrx crap. lockups, suddently spinning kwin4, flickering opengl in 3d; that seems typical for fglrx. however it's interesting that all modern 3d drivers seem to have a lot of problems currently. intel has bad performance (compared to windows), nvidia has several acceleration issues (see the "official" forum) and doesn't get compatible to standard dri/dri2 architecture.

the only cards which seem to work are old ati boards who are supported by radeon-driver. or you don't use 3d acceleration.

update
now back with the ubuntu 8.10 repository fglrx driver; stability issues seem to be gone. the performance with kde 4.2.1 is so lala, but it reacts much faster when i disable the ondemand cpu scaling governor. having 2.4ghz all time instead of 800mhz makes reaction much faster. several years ago i hacked around in powernowd to wait some minutes before scaling down the cpu (so that the system is slow when i am not in front of it), but it was the older powernowd system at that time. such changes shall be much simplier now; let's see.