Linux has driven me to buy Windows Vista

[colin davidson]

The documentation for the latest cores is out (R600 and R700?). That
bodes well for future support for late model cards. There has been no
release of documentation for earlier model cores, quite possibly
because it doesn't really exist in a usable form and would cost a
fortune to create (I have seen and used the ATI IRIS documents for the
R200 and R250. They suck. I suspect ATI always relied on easy access
to hardware designers/engineers for their device driver writers.) If
you own an old ATI card, such as a 9200, there may well never be good
drivers.

On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Tyler Aviss <tjaviss-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 12:25 PM, Lennart Sorensen
> <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>
> Well, according to the slashdot article I linked there are open specs
> now, so hopefully good Open-Source drivers will follow.
>
> As for the crashing, what card was it, and did you try updating your
> xorg.conf with the "aticonfig" command?
>
>
>
>> --
>> Len Sorensen
>> --
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>
>
>
> --
> Tyler Aviss
> Systems Support
> LPIC/LPIC-2
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