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On 02/10/12 18:35, Brad Rogers wrote:
Yes well there's the rub. Unless you can plug in a video card and install the drivers and configure the system how you want it, you're never going to know whether it works or not.On Tue, 02 Oct 2012 17:40:35 +0100 bad apple <ifindthatinteresting@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: Hello bad,experience, pretty much all Nividia and AMD cards will be reliable, supported and entirely satisfactory but there are a lot of horror stories out there... Buyer beware, and do your research before givingIME, which is admittedly a bit limited, the people making the biggest noise with their horror stories have only themselves to blame; they've failed to fully understand the job they were undertaking, and screwed things up themselves. Of course, it's always easier to blame someone else when that happens.Either way, Nvidia or AMD will require you to use their monolithic, closed, proprietary blob drivers. There are open source alternativesnVidia, yes you have to use a binary blob, if you want 3D acceleration. OTOH, the ATI/AMD drivers meet Debian's DFSG guidelines and, as such, are in the 'main' repo, rather than 'contrib' or 'non-free'. From what I can see, they don't pull any closed source blob(s) in. Reading the supplied copyright notice indicates too, that the ATI drivers are freely re-distributable and modifiable. So, open source.like nouveau but sadly they are always buggy and lack support forNouveau, like virus checking software, is chasing ever moving goal posts; it's always going to be behind. :-(
For example, I run an nVidia 5500 card with twin ports. According to almost all documentation online, Ubuntu, nVidia 5500 and nVidia driver will work. Actually some of it does, doesn't and/or maybe...
On a single screen, without 3D acceleration and Unity 2D - it's fine. Add 3D and Unity 3D is a dog. Add two screens and 3D, it's even slower. Upgrade the "authorised" Ubuntu nVidia package to the X-Swat PAA (where the latest official nVidia drivers are repackaged as Ubunts debs) and you get small improvement if you run the 2xx series drivers, upgrade to the 3xx series drivers and the whole pile of cards fall around your ears and you end up with a lovely blinking cursor in the top-left of the primary screen. Check the docs, the 5500 series card is mentioned as being supported by the 3xx series drivers...
I guess my point is, after this rant (sorry about that), has anyone got any sort of reliable combination of good cards, monitors, drivers, distributions that actually works, at a decent clip, with 3D, twin-headed setups and continue to work when the drivers are upgraded?
Martin ...and breathe..... -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq