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.
yesterday i had the chance to try out the new sony reader – something which is supposed to replace books in the far future. electronic paper seems to be a very nice development, yes you can read better than on regular displays. i would like to have a device like that for every-day-newspaper usage; but they did not even seem to really think about this possibility. imagine combining the economics part of newspaper #1 with feuilleton of newspaper #2, of course synchronized each day per wifi.
the only thing you can find on it are some bestseller books and al the things you put on yourself.
if you want more material (books) you have to get through a complicated registration/synchronization process (of course win32 / macosx only) and several minutes later you can read them, as cheap as the paper version. lol. of course all content is drm crippled (hey, we won the drm war?!); at least there seem to be support for pdf / rss newsfeeds (but why special software then?) but no wifi. goodbye idea of hacked reader with newspapers. eur299 saved ;)
update: with txtr, there seems to be a german challenger, linux equipped and much cleaner.
simons cat
