The alternate title for this entry is: ATI Drivers for Linux Suck More Than a Crack Addicted Harlot.

Well, I’ve recovered from my initial excitement and joy that came with actually managing to get my 3D drivers installed. Now I’ve come to realize how bad the ATI drivers for X.org actually are. This past weekend, one of my housemates, another friend and I went on an Unreal Tournament 2004 gaming spree. Now, I’ve played this game quite a bit in the past, and I remember it running quite well on both Windows XP and Xfree-86.

Now though, I’ve been playing things all on the lowest settings (where before everything had been cranked up as high as it could go) and… well, pictures are worth a thousand words they say:

Guess when I was playing?

That’s right, it pegs out my CPU and takes my load average up to 2 (through an oddity of how it graphs it isn’t 6).

ATI, thanks for sucking.

Ever since I migrated my Warty install to Hoary (back in September 2004), and it’s X.org x-server, I’ve had to make due without 3d video.

Why you might ask? Because frankly, ATI’s drivers for my Radeon 9700Pro suck in linux. And I mean in a huge way. Not only are they 100 times as hard to install as those for Nvidia, but the support for X.org hasn’t been all that impressive. Sure, Ubuntu has had a binary package of the driver, which I could install out of apt (and which has been installed ever since I moved to Hoary), but I’ve never gotten it to work.

So today, I happen to make my bi-monthly trip to ATI’s Linux driver page, and notice that they finally have a graphical installer! I get excited, not foreseeing the horror that would await me when I returned home and tried to use it.

It starts out pretty easily, I ran the installer as root, did the config, and restarted X. Easy right? Oh no! For some reason, ATI’s installer always tells you the installation was successful, even when it never builds the kernel module. Running it again, and looking at the log in /usr/share/fglrx/ told me it was having errors. I shrugged, I’m running a kernel not supported by Hoary (I grabbed it out of Breezy a while back when I was having some issues). So, I grabbed a new kernel, with the kernel-headers, the restricted modules, and some other goodness and reboot.

I succeed in actually getting it to make the module and install it this time… only to find that it STILL DIDN’T WORK. Getting a bit frustrated at this, as I’m used to the attempt/failure cycle that installing ATI drivers generally involves, I nuke it, and reinstall the driver from apt. I kill X, hoping that maybe, just maybe it would work, the moons would line up, a rainbow would shoot out of my butt, and somewhere, a virgin would be sacrificed to Linus Torvalds.

I must have been too excited to by actually having 3d video, I failed to notice the rainbow. Oh well, I’ve a working 3d video setup at the moment, and I’ll be very careful what I go mucking about with on this box.

Well, my new hard drive arrived, and I’m now fully migrated over to it. I followed Greenfly’s system migration tip followed by a cp -R /dev .

After coercing Knoppix to re-install Grub (the boot loader) I was all set. I’m currently repartitioning the old boot drive and pressing it into service as a media disk. If it just ends up being a hard drive problem, it will be minimized by the rare use and non-critical nature of that role.

Also, I’ve moved my blog to aragirn.net now. Everything is still accessible through blog.aragirn.net so you won’t need to update your bookmarks, RSS feed readers, etc.. I did have a little bit of a problem with links and redirects not working, but I’ve fixed that. If you run across something that should be working and isn’t, please let me know with a comment in this post. (If the comment system isn’t working, please send an email to: kyle.schneider [at] gmail.com)

So, as some of you may have noticed, my machine occasionally decides to die… I’m not too sure why, however it has these symptoms:

I’m using this as an excuse to buy a new drive (even though fsck says the partition is fine, and SMART reports no problems with the disk). Frankly, I’ve been wanting to buy a new drive and even if it isn’t the problem, I come out of it with 160 gigs more than I have now.

When it arrives, I’ll be taking the machine down to transition between hard drives (it should hopefully be a relatively painless process, but you never know. In any event, I’ll throw a post up the night before I do it, in case anyone has a dire need to visit some portion of my site.