Feisty: recent updates causing freezes ??

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Brian Fahrlander <brian at fahrlander.net> wrote:
> Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
> > Will do. Though in the past I have had dozens of hard locks, they were
> > all caused by crappy video drivers (ATI 3D proprietary drivers for the
> > Radeon 9250).
> 
>     Ya know...switching to an Nvidia card (which are now cheap, too) 
> might save you some trouble...expecially since your chipset is Nvidia 
> already.  And changing out a video card is easier than a motherboard. 
> And I've been 'all kinds of happy' with the Nvidia-under-Linux situation.

Actually I said "in the past", because I gave up on the 3D ATI drivers,
hence the card altogether (free/open driver is stable and mature, but
adds near zero acceleration, hence pointless, while the proprietary ATI
drivers gives decent acceleration but is so rough and buggy/freeze
prone, that it was just as useless as the free driver), a year ago. I
have now an Nvidia 6200 and the proprietary 3D driver, so far, "just
works", touch wood. So I don't think the video card is causing the
recent crashes, all of a sudden. 
I don't mean to knock on ATI though... I have had horror stories with
a GeForce2 for example. I would have bought Intel, since they are much
more user friendly that either ATI or Nvidia, if only they made discrete
cards, along with decent 3D performance (say equal to my current modest
GeForce 6200). 8 months ago I saw news about Intel precisely announcing
that they wanted to enter the market of high-performance discrete video
cards, along with ATI and Nvidia. But, 8 months later, I have not heard
from this plan again... I truly hope they have not given up on the
idea ! 
Else, there is of course the "Open Graphics" project
( http://www.traversaltech.com ), which aims at designing and producing
a fully open and quality (not consumer stuff like Nvidia or ATI) 3D
card with decent (GeForce 2 like IIRC) performance. But the project
just keeps getting delayed, and we might not see their first PCI card
(never mind PCI-X), before at least a year.. or 2... or more ?! :-/

Also, ATI implied earlier this year that they may revisit their
attitude toward the Linux world, but here too... I have not heard
anything new on this front recently... :-/


--
Vince