Sunday, January 11, 2009

Free Desktop At Last

When reinstalling my Gentoo, I decided to give the radeon - open source ATI driver - a try. I have Radeon 9600XT and I always had issues with the closed source fglrx driver from ATI.

I wasn't expecting much from the free driver, but the current functionality simply blew me away - dual monitors, 3D acceleration, video playback - everything works nicely. I can't honestly think of anything more I could ask for.

Thank you guys so much!!!

Currently the stable xorg-server is version 1.3 and xorg-x11 is at version 7.2, but since I like my software freshly build (plus I wanted to give the compiz fusing a try), I had to accept the unstable packages when compiling.

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge xorg-x11 xorg-server

Gentoo is a distribution for power users/developers, so I sometimes find the release process little too conservative. I would mark packages as stable much sooner, but that's probably just me :).

So now I'm just moving wobbly windows around my desktop and grinning :))

Freedom at last.

1 comments:

mantecanaut said...

I've just started using the radeon too, after fglrx stopped supporting my card. Hadn't tried radeon since Kororaa a few years ago but I'm mightily impressed.
Good times!