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So, holiday is nearly over. I'm taking Monday as well in the hopes that I can fix my sleep pattern, as well as to compensate for the day I came in (Tuesday, when nothing useful was done for various reasons). It's still too soon: I want more downtime, but the work can't wait.
So it goes, and such seems to be life right now. I'm looking forward to this project being over, even if I've been working on it so long now I suspect I'll have trouble switching to something else. Diversity is good, and all that.
Still, content... I'm sure I meant to write something mildly interesting when I opened this window. I suppose I'm doing some tidying up... Ah, yes. Slackware 13.0 is out. I use Slackware as my OS of choice: for the most part it serves me well, but a failed graphics driver update caused some trouble for me a while back. Vertical tearing, instability, the usual. Since Slack 13 is out, I figured, why not? A reinstall solves the problem, and gets me a KDE 4.2.4 desktop, which is probably going to be interesting, as I've never used KDE4 before. So, download ISO, burn, install.
The installation process was pretty painless, since I had my wits about me and gave it the correct information. The installer picked up the RAID volume holding my home directory without any trouble, etc, etc. It was all going so well...
Yes. ATI. Red-headed step-child of the Linux graphics drivers market. The company whose drivers cause untold woes for Linux users everywhere. I'm sure they're quite lovely under Windows, but next time round I'm just buying a damned nVidia card. It seems the latest release of the driver doesn't run under the configuration used in Slackware 13.0, at all: it crashes the window manager reliably, and locks the system about one time in three at the moment. Hence, it is currently uninstalled, and I'm back to one monitor and two or three frames a second OpenGL performance until ATI get their finger out and realise they need to fix things. There will be a bug report later, when I am calm and awake and so on.
Driver support. It's always the damned driver support. I wish I knew why so many companies get it wrong. Are we not paying customers, or something?
EDIT: And now the gas-lift in my chair has given up the ghost. I'm going to bed.
2009/09/20 - Torkell (23:02)
You would think as paying customers the Windows drivers would be better, but no, they're just as shoddy. Let's see... connected/disconnected state synchronisation loss between Windows and my wireless card, processes failing to exit most likely due to network drivers, an IDE card driver that likes to do long (long enough to glitch sound) busy-wait delays, another IDE driver that doesn't reliably flush the disk cache on shutdown, a SATA driver that will randomly bluescreen Windows when running in AHCI mode...
I think I've only ever seen a couple of Windows (NT-series) bluescreens that were actually Windows' fault, and not that of a driver or due to hardware failure.
2009/09/21 - Pewterfish (00:14)
Y'see, I was kinda joking there. I /did/ buy the damn card, and all. But you're right, I suppose. Why is driver support so terrible?
*gives up for the night*
2009/09/21 - Craig (08:38)
Downtime is never long enough. I say this since every weekend down here has not felt long enough. It sucks but we make do I guess.
As for the computer troubles, I pity you, I'm not sure what was worse, tearing or not turning on. At least if it doesn't turn on you don't get to see the tearing. Well, you never get to a GUI where you can see it anyway....
Driver support is shite on any OS, it is better on Windows than almost everything else, but that still isn't saying much. You remember my nVidia induced BSOD every half hour... This said, Windows is getting better when the drivers fail these days, 7 seems stable as anything, maybe that is just because like XP the manufactures are starting to understand the driver model.
Of course, there is a part of me that blames some issues on the hardware itself. Windows for example have a very nice blue tooth stack. It plug and plays my current dongle just fine. The last one I had however requires it's own painfully bad stack and was unstable as hell itself.
2009/09/21 - Pewterfish (13:44)
Mmm. I do currently have stable, non-teary graphics, which is nice. they're just crazy-slow when trying to do anything with OpenGL. Hopefully, ATI will release working Slack13 support in the next release: as soon as I figure out what to put in the bug report, they're getting one.
The hardware can certainly be to blame. Not sure if it is in this case, though: Windows performance with this card is great.