Hardware Log: ATI HD 2600 Pro

Up until this Saturday, my Linux workstation had an old Nvidia GeForce 4 MX card, whose fan recently died. We decided to upgrade the card, and I told my father that an ATI card would be preferable over Nvidia, because AMD/ATI are more FOSS-friendly and released SPECs. So he bought an ATI HD 2600 Pro card. It's r600, but quite low-end (but still not as much as the GeForce 4.).

We delayed installing it, but this Saturday, after I had to reboot after the new kernel update, we got to it. The hardware replacement went surprisingly well, and then we booted the computer. Everything went well on startup, and we got the login prompt. Then startx worked right away, as my Mandriva Cooker installation detected the hardware change and set up all the drivers accordingly. Mandriva++ .

Not everything worked flawlessly. I had to edit the xorg.conf file to re-add the settings for the Xkb Hebrew keyboard, and to change the Bits Per Pixel from 16-bits to 24-bits. Then I was happy. I'm using the RadeonHD open-source drivers, which don't really do 3-D yet, but since there are SPECs for them, the situation is expected to improve.

I'm so glad I've now escaped from Hang-vidia-land, and have a card from a company that plays along with the open-source ideology. I hope to contribute further to the open-source drivers by reading the SPECs and writing code, and hopefully I would be able to understand what I need to do better than with Nouveau. In any case, since I'm not obsessed with "gamer" computer games and am not using the high-performance 3-D/2-D effects in much, I can survive just fine using the non-3-D enabled drivers. (Just as I used the "nv" driver before the upgrade.).

Syndicated 2008-07-21 13:26:36 from shlomif