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.