Mailund on the Internet

...or maybe I am just not ready to use it there...

Actually, I have been using Linux for more than 10 years and, until I bought a Mac this year, exclusively since 1995.  Generally, I am very comfortable with Linux, but I made a major mistake when I bought my latest office machine about a year ago.

I bought a Dell 'cause I figured that since Dell sells machines with Ubuntu pre-installed (in the US and UK but sadly not in Denmark) the hardware would be supported by Linux.

Not so!

This machine has an ATI Radeon HD graphic card, and Linux support for that is practically non-existing.  ATI has a driver for it that you can install, and with that I managed to get an acceptable -- but by no means very good -- performance. 2D graphics at least.  3D graphics rarely worked.

I begged Kristian Høgsberg for help.  He is a friend of mine who works at RedHat, making eye candy for Linux. I figured he would have some suggestions.

He suggested I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora, 'cause he wouldn't know how to help me with a competing product.

I figured he was joking, but still, I switched.

In Fedora, I actually managed to get the ATI driver working.  Not perfectly, but a lot better than I had managed before.

Now, a few days ago, it stopped working.  I'm not sure what happened. I didn't fiddle around with the setup or any thing, but maybe updated package or something broke the setup.  Break it did, to the point where enabled Compiz meant the screen would just gray out and where disabled Compiz was painfully slow.  Like you wouldn't imagine.  Moving a window across the screen would take several seconds.

In frustration and  desperation I re-installed Fedora yesterday.  I was hoping I would get it back to the state it was a few days ago.  That didn't work, but I did manage to delete a week's work that I hadn't backed up.  Way to go, Dr. Mailund, way to go!

I caught Høgsberg on Jabber and asked for help again.  He suggested that I buy a nVidea graphics card. That is probably the right choice.

Anyway, I don't have time to try to fix my Linux.  I need to analyse some data before a meeting in Iceland next week and I'm leaving Friday.

I need Linux for it, though, 'cause I haven't managed to compile the software I need on my Mac.

I guess I'll just ssh to the Linux box and work that way.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 6:33 am and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.