 |
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) glyf | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/logo.jpgBest. Distro. Ever. I am not exaggerating. I ran out of disk space over the weekend, and after buying a new hard drive, I figured I'd better give Ubuntu a try. I installed the latest snapshot of Hoary Hedgehog and I was up and running in under an hour. There are still some familiar Linux-y problems, for example, configuring X to support my 12-button mouse is still an unmitigated disaster, and some people just cannot write drivers to save their lives. Before you Mac naysayers in the crowd start to gloat, at least I can burn a god damned CD without using a command line, okay? Still, the drivers work. Installing Hoary somehow increased the performance of all my disk drives - I don't know how that happened, but it was automatic, and I can now use my USB drive without looking at my watch. Ying's tablet, after not working with 5 different distros over 4 years, magically started to function properly. My USB headset was detected without complaint. My laptop can suspend and resume (though there are still a few kernel problems there). I know that many of the tools that they use were already available, but Ubuntu is the first Linux distribution that I have found which actually unleashes the full power of the free software community in a coherent way. By the way, did I mention that it includes Twisted as part of the default install? ;-)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
From: glyf |
Date: February 11th, 2005 09:42 pm (UTC) |
| (Link) |
Re: Laptop question
|
I can play City of Heroes. I can't play Doom 3. That's about as detailed as my performance analysis gets :).
On windows, performance is fine. On Linux with the free drivers, performance is good, but incomplete, as various GL extensions implemented in the card are not available in the mesa API.
However, I really can't emphasize enough how shitty the proprietary ATI drivers for Linux are. Not quite as bad as Nvidia's, but they basically only work on desktops, with single monitors. The most recent version of the drivers (and the ONLY version that works with 2.6.10) actually broke digital output support entirely, so both my desktop w/ DVI cable and my laptop get a black screen when X starts, and I can't even go back to the console.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
From: glyf |
Date: February 11th, 2005 10:11 pm (UTC) |
| (Link) |
Re: Laptop question
|
Well, they improve, and my last experience was in 2002 or so, so I could just be out of date.
However, Nvidia's drivers seem to have only one test case: the most recent version of Quake. When I was using Nvidia's drivers, I was trying to do X protocol development, and I would bring down the server regularly. Eventually I gave up and used the 'nv' driver instead, which worked perfectly. I had problems again when I attempted to use power management functionality. And again when I tried to compile in -mm patches into the kernel. And again when I tried to use input core support. Of course, they didn't even compile against development versions of the kernel.
These issues must be fixed now, or you'd barely be able to use a keyboard at the same time as their drivers, but I imagine the general pattern still holds: proprietary drivers are 8-12 months behind the free ones in terms of supporting "standard" APIs, and some never get there. For example, I think that Nvidia still doesn't support the DRI interface, and instead defined their own insane kernel interface that no other card can use. ATI only started supporting X.org's server a few months ago.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
Previous
