ancient LibreOffice

[Liam Proven]

On 12 October 2013 19:44, Ric Moore <wayward4now at gmail.com> wrote:
> My upgrade to 13.10 found my nVidia setup with two video cards, and three
> monitors without one hitch. Maybe a test drive of that to see if it helps.
> Previously I had problems with both 12.10 and 13.4
> Who knows? I'd give it a whirl.

I doubt it.

The problem is very simple and specific.

I have a Radeon HD 3470 GPU (RV620 family). This is only supported up
to Catalyst 13.1:

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/legacy?product=Legacy2&os=Linux%20x86_64

12.04 was the last version to include Catalyst 13.1.

Catalyst 13.1 is still available but only works with X.org up to v1.11
and kernel v3.4 and no later versions.

Ubuntu 12.10 included X.org 1.12 and later versions include newer
versions of X.org, therefore I can't use Catalyst 13.1 with them.

(There is a workaround but I could not get it to work:
http://www.ondatechnology.org/wiki/index.php?title=FGLRX_on_legacy_graphics_cards
)

Summary: fglrx doesn't work after 12.04 *and never will.*

The FOSS ATI Radeon driver does work, but with glitches and poorer
performance. However, with 13.04, once I installed *and updated*, it
fell over - Unity would not run. I got a completely empty desktop.
Fortunately I could use Ctrl-Alt-T to get a terminal, then run

metacity --replace

... to get a working window manager. Not much use, though. No panels,
no icons, no file manager, nothing much. I am not into minimal Linux
environments; I have friends who use nothing but xterms but I am not a
shell sort of guy. I can use the shell just fine but I like GUIs and
GUI tools.

It's possible that the FOSS Radeon driver is now good enough to run
Unity, though. We'll see when 13.10 comes out. Unity works under Mir
but there are so many display glitches it's unbearable.


-- 
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