On Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:48:20 -0800, Ian MacArthur wrote: > This sounds very much like a video driver bug with the current > open-source ATI driver. > > Note that for ATI cards, on 9.10, ubuntu have switched to the > accelerated open-source driver. In 9.4 and previous, they used the > un-accel open-source driver *or* (more usually) the ATI proprietary > binary-only driver.
You are right, I had the open-source driver installed. A few years ago I ran debian on it and I am quite certain that I installed the proprietary driver and found back then that I got much better resolution, anti- aliasing and you name it. Fonts were suddenly much, much more readable. Today I have Ubuntu 9.10 on it. > (Indeed, I think the ATI binary-only driver no longer works with the > ubuntu 9.10 distro. but I may well be wrong about that...) I tried it some minutes ago. It works, but does not support OpenGL (or GL?) at all. All programs spew streams of messages about a missing extension 135. OpenGL windows show the background. Composite on or off made no difference. > However, the GL support in the accelerated ATI open-source driver is > very seriously buggy, and a lot of the symptoms you describe sound like > exactly the sort of problems I have seen/heard about. I believe that my laptop's "ATI Mobility Radeon X1300" does not support any acceleration (or is there a distinction between accel. and direct rendering?). It is a bit more "el cheapo" than I imagined when I bought it. It boasts "512 MB Hypermemory". Of course, it means that it does not have any memory to speak of, and borrows up to 512MB of the main memory. So when I thought I was buying a puter with 1GB ram, I actually got a lot less. > For the record, I have a box with ubuntu 9.10 and an ATI X300 card that > exhibits many of the "features" you describe. With the ATI proprietary > driver under 9.4 (and FC7) it works just fine... > > I also have 9.10 boxes with Nvidia graphics and Via/S3/UniChrome > graphics and they pretty much work OK. > > Best bet: buy a cheap Nvidia card and hope! I'll be strongly inclined to try something other than ATI next time. But I guess I should have checked better. Cheap gear has its place for those that need to economize, and this laptop is serving its purpose quite well since I am not using it for any sort of gaming. Regards Enrique _______________________________________________ fltk-opengl mailing list fltk-opengl@easysw.com http://lists.easysw.com/mailman/listinfo/fltk-opengl
