[Discuss] Wide screen monitor

[stanfish]

Thanks Alan but I could not find anything on http://www.phoronix.com/ 
that I thought that was within my capabilities. ... Certainly building a 
binary deb package seems about like a homemade moon-shot to me at the 
moment. 
I did find ati-driver-installer-8-4-x86.x86_64.run on the AMD/ATI  website.
Does not seem to have changed anything.
Stan




Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> 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. I did find
>
> 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).
> __________________________
>
> Linux-powered Science
> __________________________
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