Re: [gentoo-amd64] New ATI proprietary driver

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

On Tuesday 14 November 2006 05:56, Chris Traylor wrote:
> Has anybody tried the new ATI driver? I did the emerge, and everything
> seemed fine. However, when I go to log in, any keypress or mouse click
> crashes the entire system. If I switch from the fglrx driver to the open
> source radeon driver everything works (or at least the things that the
> xorg driver supports, seems to work). I tried updating qt,kde, and
> reinstalling xorg 7.1, but all to no avail. I haven't gotten to trudging
> through the X logs yet, but I figured I'd go fishing for ideas, just in
> case, someone ran across this as well. Any ideas (sans a lecture about
> slaveryware from Duncan) would be appreciated.

I gave up on the ATI driver quite some time ago on my Turion based Acer 
Ferrari which unfortunately has an ATI card in it... Crashes, instability, 
system locks etc seemed common place. My main desktop is a dual core X2 based 
system using an nVidia card in TwinView and it works very well.

I have found that I hardly use the 3D stuff on my laptop and so do not miss 
the proprietary driver that much. I would pay for a good open source card if 
one is ever released and could offer me dual DVI output on PCI-E but for now 
I use the open source driver on my laptop and the proprietary nVidia driver 
on my desktop. Your mileage may vary - right now I spend most of my time in 
Kile, Kate, KDVI, KPDF and Konsole... Not too demanding on graphics until I 
finish my thesis!

I found the ATI drivers very flaky and gave up on them in the end - I may give 
them another try when I have some free time again... Until then good luck 
with it.