[ale] thinking about switching away from ubuntu

[Michael Trausch]

On Wed, 2010-04-14 at 15:45 -0400, Robert Coggins wrote:
> I am really hoping ubuntu 10.4 will fix my problem with my system
> locking up when using compiz on dual monitors.  If not I may be giving
> fedora a go here soon. 

Ubuntu 10.04 has a free software, 3D enabled graphics driver for ATI
systems that even supports kernel mode setting, and it has no problem on
my laptop doing dual-head with the laptop monitor and either HDMI or
VGA.  I have not tried to see if it will do triple-head or not.

On my NVIDIA system, dual head works excellently in 10.04 as well as
9.10.  I did have a problem with the on-board graphics chipset (an
NVIDIA), but when I also had that problem in Windows (I wanted to see if
I could eliminate the driver as a cause, and that I did).  When I added
a PCI-E NVIDIA card into the system, all was well again.

As a side note:  For just about everything, my laptop with the free
software ATI driver performs much better than the proprietary NVIDIA
driver does.  I have never been able to get the proprietary ATI driver
to work well, but then again I've never had a terribly large amount of
time to spend on working out issues with proprietary software---I'd
sooner run without X than fuss with non-working drivers.

One other thing that I have learned is that not all graphics chipsets
from the vendors are equal in terms of reliability.  The I've generally
had very good luck with NVIDIA-based systems, though the most recent
on-board that I had was awful.  It would cause horrible hard-locks to
the point where even the power button on the system would fail to
power-off after holding it in for five seconds; I'd have to pull the
plug to reboot.

	--- Mike