[Gloucs] Video card on a new computer

[Anthony Edward Cooper]

I have the NVidia drivers as provided by one of the Debian extra repos 
(multi-media/non-free?). These are the NVidia binary ones repackaged as 
debs. Never had to recompile the drivers in 14 months when doing an 
update as they are managed debs (going from deb 5 to 6 may be another 
story but they should just get upgraded in line with  the kernel). Worst 
comes to the worst, ok you compile them - its very simple. With Debian 
and Ubuntu you get patches for the kernel but the kernel version number 
(as stamped on the images) remains the same through the entire release 
(i.e. Debian 5/Lenny). I have a number of proprietary drivers (VMware 
etc) that I thought I would have to keep recompiling every few weeks but 
I have never had to touch post installation :-) (not switched to deb 6 
at the mo).

I have an IBM T41 with an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500. The Linux drivers 
for this are terrible. I have tried different drivers and settings, 
latest versions etc. At least catting something in an xterm window does 
not cause a crash any more (turned off DRI support). But try and do 
anything like watch a movie, even iPlayer and it quite possibly goes 
boom. I have had Linux on my laptop (dual boot) for about 16 months and 
it has yet to not crash (badly) within a 2-3 week period. I now use 
MS-Windows XP for anything that is graphically demanding or where I want 
reliability. I know of others that have had similar experiences with 
other ATI cards. Of course different models, different experiences, my 
old ATI Mach 64 worked a charm!

At the end of the day if you just want a Linux distro that will just 
work and give you all the wizzy graphical features then I would always 
go with NVidia and their drivers to be on the safe side. As for specific 
ATI or Intel chipsets, please others that use these come forward and 
give your experiences. Downside is that NVidia is non-open source. But 
my priority, as are most end users, is always a working stable system.

My Mum's IBM uses an Intel chipset and works fine (I'll get back to you 
with the details).

Tony.
Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> On Sun, May 08, 2011 at 12:04:57AM +0100, Anthony Edward Cooper wrote:
>   
>> NVidia is your best bet as NVidia support Linux and do their own
>> drivers. Intel seem to be well supported by the stock Intel device
>> drivers that come with Linux (or at least for the chip sets that I
>> have used it on). I would not touch ATI though. Linux support for
>> quite a few ATI cards is pretty bad and I think ATI don't support
>> Linux any more.
>>
>> I'd always go for NVidia and their drivers. Ubuntu and Debian have
>> their drivers in assorted repos.
>>
>> Tony.
>> John Kilgour wrote:
>>     
>>> I may soon have to replace my 2003 PC with an Athlon XP processor
>>> and Intel graphics. Possible new machines (low cost) have Intel,
>>> Nvidia or ATI radeon graphics. Please can any of you indicate
>>> which of these are most Linux friendly?
>>> Thanks in advance
>>> John Kilgour
>>>
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>>     
>
> Two men, two different opinions.
>
> Intel appear not to do separate chipsets for graphics cards any more - so no add in cards.
>
> For netbooks and laptops, there are a couple of low end Intel graphics chipsets with 
> nasty features / closed binary bits which cause problems (Google Poulsbo video driver)
> and almost all Intel chipsets steal memory from the system board.
>
> Nvidia - nice, but proprietary driver _WILL_ involve kernel rebuilds with every release,
> may not be well supported by distributions and may suddenly be dropped by Nvidia themselves.
> The ION chipsets on some mini-ITX boards work quite well, however, if you don't need heavyweight 3D.
>
> There is a fully free 2D/3D driver for some Nvidia cards coming along nicely - nouveau - but it 
> almost certainly won't support latest cards well.
>
> ATI - now that they're owned by AMD - are coming along quite nicely. Radeon drivers 
> work fairly well for all but the latest gamers cards. 
>
> Am very tempted by the latest mini-ITX boards with the E350 chipset from AMD - dual core, 64 bit and
> virtualisation capable, will take up to 8GB of memory and the graphics chipset doesn't suck - all
> for about 30W of power.
>
> As ever, it depends what you want to do and how you want to do it. If your PC's greatest demand for
> full 3D is the odd screensaver it will be very different from wanting to do full rendering. Note: Ubuntu's Unity
> interface is quite demanding on the video card because it presumes 3D rendering, 256 / 512M of memory on card
> as far as I can see. 
>
> At the moment (11.04) Ubuntu will revert to plain GNOME if the machine won't do Unity (like my netbook / any machine
> under KVM) but Ubuntu are planning that Unity will be the only desktop interface by the next release (11.10).
>
> Non-Intel architecture ARM boards are almost all proprietary - Nvidia's Tegra chipset is popular - and no-one is 
> willing to help ports at the moment with graphics details :(
>
>
> All the best,
>
> Andy
>
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