Linux has driven me to buy Windows Vista

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 11:57:12AM -0500, Tyler Aviss wrote:
> Actually I had an overall question/theory about this. Can anyone
> confirm or correct me on this...
> 
> 
> I believe that one of the issues with Cedega VS windows is that NVidia
> cards have better OpenGL support, and Cedega translates the applicable
> DirectX calls to the appropriate OpenGL ones (which in the case of ATI
> might not work as well if the GL support is lacking)? Since ATI has
> been bought out by AMD their drivers have (IMHO) improved greatly
> though, and according to slashdot they've open-sourced their drivers
> as well, so hopefully things will be even better in the future
> 
> http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/30/0337204

They might have improved but they still aren't great.

Having installed a few ATI video cards at work recently I was rather
surprised to find that:

The fglrx driver crashes (and takes the machine with it) if you don't
explicitly tell it to use 24bit colour in the xorg.conf file.
Apparently by default it wants to use 8bit, and it also happens to not
support 8bit (says so in the crash log), and rather than exiting with
that message, it crashes.

Strangely every other driver I have ever used with xorg defaults to
24bit colour, and none of them crash either.  They may fail to run and
exit with an error, but they don't crash.

So until the day there are full open specs for the ATI cards and someone
other than ati writes a driver from scratch, I just wouldn't bother.
Clearly ATI still can't write drivers.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists