ATI graphics in Ubuntu

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SupportedArchitectures

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport

http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw

Hope these help! I still haven't figured out how to us them! Sadly it seems that nVidia cards work much better especially in Wine. I wince as i write this partly because i have been a long-time supporter of ati and think they are great but mostly because they seem to be very supportive of OpenSource. Although having looked at what nVidia are doing it seems they might even be doing more! In terms of supporting the 'good guys' i would probably still go with ati but have to say that even nVidia's proprietary driver and their weird 'OpenSource' one seem better quality and allow more games and stuff to run better. The new Noveau driver looks like a really good and possibly truely OpenSource project.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

PS i would definitely check up on what i've said because i've only really picked up on most of that by rumour-and-gossip.

Hi Tom,

Those words really do help! Nvidia versus ATI is a difficult decision that I'm finding difficult to take. I'm an old fan of Nvidia but an even greater one of AMD. The latter seem to be almost pro linux and certainly have a very solid reputation amongst Linux users. Recently, AMD have also taken over the control of ATI and I'm hoping this will result in a vast improvement of their linux drivers. On the other hand, despite a lack of help from the manufacturers, the linux community have themselves created a very convincing collection of drivers for most Nvidia cards.

The weakest aspect of Ubuntu has to be the fact that buying new hardware is always a major gamble and failure would mean reverting to Windows where we can always be sure that ALL the hardware will work perfectly! Rumour-and-Gossip are basically all we have to help us in our choice, so your contributions and those of others are always most welcome!

Thanks!

lol, thanks. I would go with nVidia for the next year or so and then look around again about then.

Is this machine going to be a linux only? or Windows too? If linux only then i wouldn't bother getting a lot of Ram. 32bit Ubuntu seems better than 64bit, in terms of how much is easily accessible in the repos, but can only address something like 2Gb Ram or 4Gb (with a tweak). 32bit is very much faster on a 64bit machine than it'd be on a 32bit machine and just as with most linux distros the 32bit version does plenty of multi-threading and makes full use of multiple cores in a machine (dual/quad core etc).

I'm not even sure about the advantages of having 2 graphics cards as many seem to be able to support 2 monitors off 1 card, although surely that has an impact on performance? Ok, so 2 cards makes sense then i guess ;) Setting up 2 monitors to use at the same time was quite tough just 6 months ago but now seems like quite a few people are doing it fine. I'm not convinced tho, but haven't tried at all recently and of course i'm on an ati card anyway lol. I might have a tinker around with this sort of thing tomorrow or something.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Look at it this way Tom, this machine IS going to be exclusive! One way or the other........

Your comments about the memory bring me new and very interesting surprises. By halving the memory I could economically upgrade the processor up to a three or four core AMD Phenom XX4, or, if you think it wise, change to an INTEL Core 2 quad. I've heard that the latter work more closely with Nvidia but are not as well adapted to Ubuntu.

I'm not a gamer but running two screens would allow me to work away in my office whilst keeping a video cam watch on other areas.

What are your views on the AMD versus INTEL choice?

Mark

Err, i'd better avoid that question. I haven't a clue about Cpu's. I'm fond of Amd but i don't know Intel.

When i get a new machine i try to allow room to gradually upgrade - eg only 2 sticks of ram rather than 4, so i'd get half the ram in a way that lets me double it later without throwing anything away. There are issues about 2 sticks the same combining well so a matched pair, as you've suggested, seems a good plan. I'm not sure this approach would work with graphics cards, i just don't know. Something to boot up a cd would make things easier for installing but for that i mostly use an old drive from a previous machine. Cooling is fairly critical, of course. In my last machine i spent a high percentage of total cost on the cooling but then carried a lot of that across into my new system. I might have over-spent but it was worth it as they're still going strong.

One of these links i gave earlier would be much more helpful about specific components and whether they work well in linux

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SupportedArchitectures

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport

http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw

Hmmm, i've got a lot of opinions but nothing really solid. I guess i'm slightly jealous because i rarely get to buy a new machine and it's kinda scary. I really enjoy upgrading my current machine tho :)

Good luck and have fun with this
Regards from
Tom :)

Tom, Here's a revised configuration based on your considerations so far.......

1 x Motherboard - ASUSTeK M3N78-EM (NVIDIA GeForce 8300) - Micro ATX
1 x Processor - AMD Phenom X4 Quad-Core 9850 - Socket AM2+ 0.065 micron Cache L2 2 Mo Cache L3 2 Mo
2 x Hard Discs - Western Digital Caviar Green 500 Go 16 Mo Serial ATA II - WD5000AACS
1 x RAM - Corsair Dominator 4 Go (kit 2x 2 Go) DDR2-SDRAM PC8500 CL5 - TWIN2X4096-8500C5D
1 x Graphic card - Gainward Bliss 9500 GT - 512 Mo DVI/HDMI - PCI Express (NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT)
1 x Power Supply - Corsair VX450W - ATX 12V 2.2

Naturally there will also be a case, DVD writer, card reader and cooling fans etc... The Video card is fan-less but the case includes 4 x 120mm silent ventilators. Total budget limit is 650 euros which, hopefully, should buy me something reasonably useful, well-founded and compact. Sounds boring, but hopefully, with Ubuntu, it will be fun!

 Thanks for your time and help Tom. It has been of more use to me than the Hardware Support Lists that are really very limited and nearly always out of date. I have contributed to them myself on a few occasions, although mostly with peripheral equipment. Vital parts seem to be added only after they have left the shelves of the retailers.

Lol, sorry i made it boring! Change it around again, it's your machine! To me it sounds cunning, smart and full of potential. I have a graphics card with passive cooling, it practically defines sex-appeal and the side is often off my case so people can admire it. I have 1 huge fan just above the centre of the case to blow cool air over the beautiful "rose" cooling fins of my Cpu, and also the ram. It's so quiet! People are amazed when they 'hear' my machine. I spray painted the frontage of my ancient cd-drive so it looks just right in the case. The newer Dvd drive just looks all wrong, but i'm loath to paint it too, i hardly ever use it. My most recent addition is a hugely powerful power supply. 650W! There's now 2 reasons for wanting it outside my case but it doesn't seem very practical.

Does 'silent ventilators' just mean 'holes in the side'? Is it going to be built elsewhere and then shipped to you or are you building it yourself? Are you going to be able to try all the parts out very soon after getting it so that you can 'return' parts or is it going to be a case that you're not allowed to open? I know so little about some of the parts you're talking about that i don't even know for sure that it isn't a laptop!

Ubuntu can be fun. Playing around with the compiz cube and all the eye-candy is great but i tend to turn a lot of that off after a while. Great fun at the start tho! I kept firewriting ;)

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Hi Tom,
You are making it interesting, it is what I shall be doing with it that is boring... Planning it and building it are fun!
In reply to your queries the silent fans are just those rated somewhere under 30dB (decibels) and the bigger the diameter the quieter they tend to be. Naturally the case must be provided with the larger diameter mounting apertures. With my limited budget I have gone for a less powerful 450W supply but from a very good manufacturer. In theory at least, the greater stability of these upmarket brands is more beneficial than the power which, in my case, is rarely needed. Although I'm using two graphic chips, I am not a gamer and won't be calling on them for explosions in smoky war scenes, so the power needs are not excessive. The computer that I am building is a normal desktop "mini- tower", the shorter one with only two racks for the DVD writer etc. Assembling from parts is really very easy and involves only the ability to read and to wield a screwdriver. Once you've built one you feel so proud that you're almost ready to tackle a flat-pack wardrobe from IKEA. That was my big mistake and I still can't close the bloody doors! I actually build about 20-30 computers per year but these are nearly always low-cost machines running Windows and are not as much fun as building your own.

Thank you for all your help and once built I'll be posting the final configuration and results to the Hardware Support forums. Hopefully you will be building yourself a new one soon.

Kind regards,
Mark

Wow, i feel a bit foolish now but at least i made a good point about not needing so much ram with linux!

It's good to have your linux-swap partition just a little more than the size of ram but twice as much is about the upper limit. It's also a good idea to have a separate partition for your /home and a spare little partiton of between 1Gb and 20Gb for experimenting with installing other linux-distros on. These can then often use the same /home and certainly the same linux-swap. If you really want to have some good guides on partitions i've got a few, including an excellent couple of articles from distrowatch about Lvm although i tend to find primary partitions are much better for the OS. I'm hoping that the 2 500Gb drives aren't going to be software raided in the bios as linux seems to prefer either the real thing or as 2 separate drives. 450W does sound fine, 650W is excessive.

Dual-boots are an excellent way to get acquainted with linux at your own pace and also it can be handy for a few things anyway. Ubuntu needs about 15Gb plus swap but can then read the data that's on the Windows partitions. I tend to leave people with a dual-boot that defaults into Windows but gives them a choice of trying Ubuntu (or a tiny distro if space is a concern).

20 - 30 machines /year and you're listening to my advice! lol, i'm sure you'll have fun and do well :)
Thanks, good luck and regards from
Tom :)

As I said Tom, those other machines were all built for Windows and I've been fixing that for 28 years. However, my first introduction to Ubuntu was about one year ago and I had a lot of hardware problems that make me very nervous of building a machine exclusively for Ubuntu. You can see from the change in my configuration that your advice has been very seriously taken on board. You openly admit to not knowing it all but I get the impression that when you do give an opinion, it's worth listening to! Your views on memory and CPU use was a real eye-opener to me and I would have hated to build the machine without knowing that. It is also obvious that you know a heap more about the partitioning peculiarities of Linux whilst I would have been content to let Ubuntu sort that out automatically. Not any-more, I'm now hoping you'll lead me into greener pastures? I wasn't planning on a raid set-up as I've also a preference for separate drives. I will not be dual booting as my current machine will reverted to Windows which, I still use for work software that doesn't like Wine.

Believe me Tom, I know practically nothing about Ubuntu or Linux but long term computer experience does tell me that your advice is soundly based, modestly given and well worth listening to!

Mark

Separate drives seems to be a much more flexible approach. People who want folders spanning several drives seem to be blind to Murphy's Law.

There are many complicated ways of partitioning in order to try squeezing an extra bit of performance out of linux but mostly i aim to keep it simple, "content to let Ubuntu sort that out automatically" is really the best plan. "Guided" rather than "Automatic" partitioning about halfway through the install would be good for your system and would be informative for you. "Manual" is handy for sorting out tricky combinations, pre-prepared partitions and trying to reinstall without formatting - none of which are relevant for your machine at this point.

Partitions can be tweaked later. Even having the /home folder on it's own partition is a mixed blessing. It is good to have all your data and settings on another partition tho so i would advise /home on another partition if it gives you the option but if it doesn't i wouldn't worry much.

If the slave drive isn't going to be pulled out and stuck in Windows machines then i would avoid ntfs entirely and go with the safer ext3, still as a primary partition (exactly the same as the main Ubuntu partition) but i'm not sure i would make this my /home partition. The slightly better performance and reduced wear on read/write heads is, for me, out-weighed by a reduction in flexibility. It'd be difficult to pull the drive out as Ubuntu would be dependant on finding the users settings on the slave drive there. I would keep the bulk of my data on this one tho and there might be some fancy way of getting it embedded right into the file-system by making your /home/username/documents folder move onto this drive, presumably through fstab. I tend to just navigate my way through (sometimes using soft-shortcuts) to the secondary drive without anything fancy like this, at the moment. Linux gives many options.

On a machine that really needs to have a swap then it's better to put it on another drive and preferably at the front of that drive (read/writes are faster at the front?!) but in your case you'll probably only need the swap very occasionally, mostly only if the machine somehow goes into suspend/hibernate mode
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq

So to summarise, my ideal partitioning would be (in the order they would be on the drives)

Master Drive
25Gb ext3 Primary Partition for Ubuntu
450Gb (ish) ext3 Primary Partition for /home
20Gb ext3 Primary Partition for experimenting with installing other distros
5Gb linux-swap Primary Partition

Slave Drive
500Gb (ish) ext3 Primary Partition for data

The swap is excessively large but allows for if you do ever add some more ram in the dim and distant future, mostly it just made the maths easy ;) 25Gb is more than the 8Gb Ubuntu needs and more than the normal 10-15Gb i use normally but again there's no harm in giving it extra space & hence a bit more flexibility. Making the experimentation partition a different size from the main Ubuntu one makes it easier to work out which is which. Anything from 1Gb up to around 20Gb gives room to explore lots of different distros, having it this large allows you to try out the larger distros like Mandriva, OpenSuse and Fedora errr ok, that's 2 RedHat ones and i was trying to get 1 distro from each of the 6 or 8 major forks lol. When experimenting with these try to keep their /home on the same partition as the OS in case they want to reformat the /home space - i don't think they do but it's best to be safe. Perhaps on the other drive but perhaps not.

I would happily settle for

Master Drive
497Gb (ish) ext3 Primary for Ubuntu
2.1Gb linux-swap Primary

Slave Drive
500Gb (ish) ext3 Primary for data

and then i'd explore Gparted from a LiveCd to resize to get

Master Drive
25Gb ext3 Primary for Ubuntu
472Gb (ish) ext3 Primary for data
2.1Gb linux-swap Primary

Slave
500Gb (ish) ext3 Primary for data

and then i'd explore documentation and help forums about using /etc/fstab maybe to setup /home or /home/username/documents on different partitions.

Wow, that was fun to write. Writing it down made me think again about my own setup and maybe moving that /home/tom/documents folder somewhere a bit more sensible than the tiny & ancient 8Gb drive i'm using at the moment! lol, i still feel i'm experimenting with linux and i'm not quite ready to plug in my decent drives that still have a messy Windows setup that all fell over. Data recovery time but maybe not until tomorrow, there's too much fun to get on with today ;)

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

There's a saying in my country "The grass is always greener on the other side". Ultimately your own way of setting it up is probably the best but each linux user will probably give very good reason why some other way is better lol

Again, good luck and regards :)
Tom :)

Hi Tom,
As you say, all that partition stuff does sound like fun and because I'm as yet incapable of finding my own way, I will be doing it your way. On the slave drive I intend keeping a mirror type backup of my /home folder and use the remainder for storage of bulkier "Media" files. I'm currently backing up to an external drive but this is not working well because after a few days Ubuntu seems to make a virtual copy of that drive and then ignore the real drive. All very confusing but I imagine the more permanent internal drive will overcome this inconvenience. I like to keep back-ups, even in the security of linux, because I once had a hard disk explode within a machine. It wrecked the entire machine but the secondary hard drive did come out in working order, albeit a little scratched.

Your quote "The grass is always greener on the other side" sounds too much like a reference to the Microsoft Windows default screen and we don't want to go there, do we?! Ubuntu is more like a place where you can do your own thing because if you get in too deep there is always someone around to pull you out!

This weekend I'll be ordering the parts and I should have it all up and running within about ten days. I'll post back to you then with the results. Meanwhile have a good Easter and thanks again for all your help.

Mark

PS off list communications can be addressed to login at aliceadsl dot france.

Ahah, smart. In that case ignore what i said for the slave drive and the first should do the job fine :) It still sounds like a fairly unusual event, not one likely to be replicated anytime soon, hopefully!

Having a backup and spare spare space for temporary use if there's a problem both sound like an excellent plan. Hopefully this will mean one will have far less wear-and-tear and so hugely out-last the main one.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Hi Tom,

As promised here's an update...

I have now completed the assembly of my new computer including these principle parts:-

-Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-UD2H (AMD 780G) - Micro ATX - Integrated ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics
-Processor - AMD PHENOM2 X4 Quad-Core 920 2.8GHZ Socket AM2+ 0.045 micron
-Memory - OCZ Reaper HPC Kit 4Go (paired 2 x 2 Go) DDR2-SDRAM PC8500 CL5
-Hard Discs - Western Digital Caviar Green 2 x 500 Go 16 Mo Serial ATA II - WD5000AACS (not in raid)
-2nd Graphic Card - ASUSTeK EAH3650 SILENT MAGIC/HTDP/512M - 512 Mo TV-Out/Dual DVI - (ATI Radeon HD 3650)
-Power Supply - Corsair VX450W - ATX 12V 2.2
-DVD Burner - LG GH22NS40NRBB
-Case - COOLER MASTER Elite 341 Mini-tower
-Card Reader - HEDEN LECME35IN2 3.5" bay mounted

These parts were purchased from LDLC.com in France and cost just under 700 euros including shipping and value added tax at 19.6%.

The original and only operating system installed was Ubuntu 9.04. The total installation took somewhat less than one hour including the re-installation of my previously saved "home" files and the additional installation of programs such as 'Songbird' and 'Google Earth'. NO PROBLEMS WERE ENCOUNTERED AT ALL and the 'Crossfire' ATI graphics cards were immediately recognised and operational.

You will notice that your recommendations have been acted upon and that the Processor was upgraded whilst the memory size was reduced. However I did take the risk with ATI graphics and was rewarded with an amazingly good result. Ubuntu 9.04 gave me the fastest and smoothest installation I've ever had the pleasure to experience.

Thanks for your help Tom, without your input it would probably have gone pear shaped!!!

Mark

Lol, brilliant. Glad it worked out well :)))
Good to hear 9.04 was a success too :))
I think you'd have been fine on your own but yeah, i think it helps to talk these things through sometimes. Thanks :)
Congrats and regards from
Tom :)