The Linux Extremist

It’s extremely hot here in England. Yesterday the temperature busted the 30 degrees Celcius mark (around 90 degrees Fahrenheit) and I’ve confined myself in a room with a powerful air conditioner, trying to convince myself the heat and the pollen are irrelevant.

While I had the time, I decided to re-install Ubuntu on my HP Compaq nx7000 and my custom built desktop; in the case of the desktop, I wanted to try using Easyubuntu (http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/), a tool which will set up everything from Microsoft fonts to a Flash player without requiring any extra intervention.

EasyUbuntu is a good tool, to a point - as a Linux user, I am not thrilled by the idea of having all sorts of things working in the background to install items of which I’m not aware. I tried it once letting it run fully - then again, after once more having wiped the PC, letting it run partially. I was happier when it ran partially. Fully, I had let it set up everything from Macromedia Flash to the Java run-time plugin to my Nvidia drivers. It did not get everything right - for example, the need for a Flash plugin on Opera failed, and I was better off setting up the Nvidia drivers myself. However, where it shines is setting up the computer to play MPEG, WMV and DVDs. All these formats work perfectly now.

Additionally, EasyUbuntu provided an answer to a relatively minor question that I had - where do I find a tool that uncompresses RAR files. All in all, kudos to the developers behind it.

I reinstalled Ubuntu on my laptop because it had become a dumping ground for various xorg.conf files. Ever since the release of Dapper, I have been truly struggling with the ATI drivers for the nx7000, which has an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 (64 MB RAM) card. The drivers that come with Ubuntu are adequate, but don’t have 3D acceleration. So that has led me to try to install the dreaded fglrx driver.

I say dreaded, because ATI has made a huge mistake from which many users simply have not recovered - at a certain point, their drivers simply do not work with older graphics chipsets like mine. This came as a shock after I got it working with Breezy: I had 3D acceleration, no problem. With Dapper and the new fglrx driver, no matter what I tried, I kept getting a blank screen. At best, I’d hear the familiar Ubuntu drum beat, but there would be nothing on the screen.

I have tried installing older drivers, but Ubuntu’s update manager kept on insisting that I update it - even then, the old driver didn’t work perfectly. I followed suggestions on the Unofficial ATI Linux Driver Wiki (http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Dapper_Installation_Guide) - again, totally useless. It truly does feel like ATI has joined with Microsoft and Intel in trying to kick users into upgrading their systems. I can deduce this from the fact that I have had no such problems with the ATI driver on my Savrow Katana K90 laptop, which is also using the latest driver.

So the nx7000 is wiped clean and using Ubuntu’s reliable old ati driver. To be honest, I had used that with Breezy for a very long time and hadn’t noticed a problem until I was told on Ubuntu Forums that it lacked 3D acceleration.

In contrast to ATI’s idiocy, Nvidia shines. The old system I built at work, using a very old AGP card, responds just as well to the drivers Nvidia provides as the 6600 I have in my custom desktop. So thanks to Nvidia, and truly, ATI, go to hell.

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