Weekly edition	Kernel	Security	Distributions	Contact Us	Search
Archives	Calendar	Subscribe	Write for LWN	LWN.net FAQ	Sponsors

HD2600 = R600

Posted Jun 24, 2008 19:48 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
In reply to: HD2600 = R600 by NAR
Parent article: Linux Graphics, a Tale of Three Drivers

There's a definite tradeoff here.  Buying an nVidia and using their binary 
drivers would (probably) make things work well now, while an ATI with free 
drivers might have problems now.  But with the ATI card the driver is 
likely to only get better with time, while with the nVidia card the driver 
is likely to get harder to make work.

So it should be interesting to see how things are with the same card 
running next year's software.  Or even this fall's software.

(Log in to post comments)

HD2600 = R600

Posted Jun 26, 2008 12:38 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

By the way, is there relatively pain-free method to test the latest and greatest drivers (and
X)? Doing a "dist-upgrade" can lead to nasty non-graphics related surprises, a live CD with
some applications (e.g. googleearth) would be more useful for this purpose.

HD2600 = R600

Posted Jun 26, 2008 12:48 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

My colleagues and I use the most recent Ubuntu Live CD for that purpose.  But those 
only come out every six months.  If I want to get more fine-grained, there are places I 
can get .deb packages of the most recent driver versions for certain cards; installing 
those while retaining backups up previous known-working versions works for me.