[Discuss] Wide screen monitor

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2008-05-06 11:29-0700 stanfish wrote:

> Sorry to be dense on this but
> 1) would I find those drivers on the AMD or ATI websites or in a Debian 
> repository, and
> 2) then having found them how does one install a driver in a Debian system 
> (Mepis) and then point the system to use it rather than what's there now?
> 3) and if these are dumb questions I apologize in advance.

Stan, those are actually good questions.  The pace of X development has
tremendously increased driven by a number of factors including a more open
development model (less of the cathedral, more of the bazaar), a new
configuration method, newly open specifications from AMD/ATI (see more
below), more interest in 3D, tiny but strategic parts of X going into the
kernel, etc. Because of these rapid changes I think it would be fair to
characterize this period as "the" X software revolution.

Some great things are going to be coming out of all this X development
activity a year or so down the road (especially for those with Intel or
AMD/ATI hardware), but meanwhile the free desktop user has a lot of turmoil
to deal with. Under these circumstances I think it is probably best if you
get as much guidance from your particular distribution as possible.

Here is what I did faced with a similar situation trying to keep up with the
rapid Intel driver/X/kernel changes for my Debian testing/unstable distro.

(I) I learned how to build binary deb packages from debian source packages.
This involves apt-get source (to get the source package), apt-get build-dep
(to install the build dependencies of the package), and the debuild
application to build the binary debs. Once I could build debs, then I could
apply patches to the source code to keep up with (and test) the Intel driver
changes.

(II) As an alternative to building debs for myself as in (I), I found some
kind soul amongst the Debian X packagers was doing the same thing in the
Debian experimental repository so I soon switched to that method, but I
mention (I) in case nobody is doing the same thing for Mepis.  (Note, I
very much doubt a Debian deb would work on Mepis so I don't recommend you
try the Debian experimental repository).

Once, a binary deb is available (either by method I or II) you can install
it using dpkg --install.

The reason I went to all this trouble is the Intel driver did not work well
(desktop freezes every few days) for my g33 chipset for version 2.1.0,
2.2.0, or 2.2.1.  (I tried all of those since November when I bought my new
computer.) These failures came as a surprise to me because Intel has the top
X driver reputation right now, but even that software team has been having
trouble dealing with the pace of change in X. Fortunately, thanks to bug
reports from me and many others the Intel driver does seem to work well (so
far) with version 2.3.0.

The best source of information I have found on ongoing X changes is
http://www.phoronix.com/. According to articles there, there is actually a
group sponsored directly by AMD and also a SUSE group indirectly financed by
AMD (why?) which are working in a semi-competitive way on two separate ATI
drivers. Thus, you will probably want to try both to see which works best
for you. It appears both drivers work reasonably well for 2D (what most
desktop display software uses now), but development of AMD/ATI 3D capability
(used for certain games and also some optional 3D special effects for the
desktop) is just starting.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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