OK, a few steps forwards, a couple back, then back and forth to make me dizzy. Firstly, I downgraded my
kernel to 2.6.10, and I'm going to stay on it until something makes me change. Small
changesets are great for
development, but they're hell for
stability. Every
kernel upgrade's left something
broken, be it in 2.6.5 (
everything was broken), 2.6.8 (
ext2/3 was broken), 2.6.9 (
pilot), and 2.6.10 has been the only one that worked completely. Even the new
fglrx supports it.
Speaking of which, I upgraded fglrx and started using it. ATI drivers for linux are "t3h sux0r", as they say in some parts of spain. They support a "big screen" mode, which makes your two screens into a big
framebuffer, or the "dual desktops" mode, which effectively gives you two
x-servers. Both of these are shit, since they can't use
Xinerama, which effectively makes your system work like the windows' dual desktops. The option is effectively to use the open source drivers and be able to do normal stuff fine, or use the accelerated ATI drivers and not have the two desktops. Things really don't like either the dual or big screen modes.
I switched back to the XOrg servers on
Ubuntu, since the guy offering the debian fglrx packages also did it. Ubuntu is great, since it's free, and I'll be recommending it to anyone who wants to get linux from now on. Based on Debian, good for beginners, and has the latest software. Point being, I've got the Ubuntu tree off my debian "
repository". Hopefully it won't cause problems. Anyway, at this point I discover that the ATI drivers won't use
composite (fancy transparencies and shadows) with
DRI (accelerated
GL). Bloody ATI. Nvidia peeps are laughing at me right now. I mean, I heard the ATI drivers were bad, but damn.
Anyway, I'll be hoping they get accelerated composite / damage / RandR / etc. happening soon.
