Ati Card support being dropped? Not mentioned in Jaunty release notes.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/904

The way I read the information from AMD is that they will declare some of the older chips as "end of life" and withdraw support. The purpose is to focus development on the newer chips.

Newer ATI graphics chips will be supported.

This process is no different to Ubuntu's 18 months version obsolescence.

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Thanks Andre but my main question is "Can i revert to Xserver 1.5 and remove 1.6? If so then how?". My second question is "Can a note be added to the Jaunty release notes to say that ati cards from series 1000 and before wont work in Jaunty?"

 think what Ubuntu have done is sensible but doesn't take into account that ati's 1000 series was great but is fairly old, 5years or so old. Newer ati cards, except the ultra-new 4000 series, were a regression. 2000 series had some fairly serious flaws and 3000 series was just a dye-shrink of the 2000 series (the dye-shrink didn't end up improving anything unfortunately). Consequently people are likely to either have a 5year or older card or an expensive (but worth it) ultra-new card - carefully avoiding anything from the last few years.

Ubuntu's 18month 'obsolescence' is quite different because it gives 3 chances of doing an easy upgrade and even after that it's fairly easy to create a new /home partition and then install a newer Ubuntu over the top of the old / also it's fine to keep using an unsupported Ubuntu as long as you don't need anything new. The old version keeps on working. Upgrading Ubuntu doesn't result in squandering earth's precious resources. Ati are forcing me into an unnecessary upgrade cycle and are trying to force me to dump my perfectly fine graphics card into a landfill site.

Reverting to Xserver 1.5 would save me from having to ditch my 'old' ati card which works really well as long as i avoid using Jaunty. I am surprised it wasn't mentioned in the release notes for Jaunty, given the types of things that were in those notes
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/904
This has resulted in bad advice being given to people and makes Ubuntu seem like something worth avoiding because it 'doesn't work at all' and 'keeps crashing'

Sorry about this
Regards from
Tom

Thanks Andre for your time on this so far.
Sorry my posts are so long
Regards from
Tom :)

I don't mind the long posts, Tom.

I cannot answer your question regarding the xserver but do think that you are barking up the wrong tree. The older ATI cards are not going to stop working suddenly and you can still get drivers for them - there will just not be any further development of the old drivers.

As to ATI cards of a certain vintage not working in releases from Jaunty onwards - that is not so. You will, however, have to be selective in choosing the driver appropriate to your card. Whether or not that option is offered when activating a graphics driver via Harware Drivers I cannot say.

There is no need to discard your "old" ATI card.

If I have completely misunderstood your concerns, please forgive me. This may be better placed as a bug report.

Andre

I think that has pretty much covered my worries but i still need to work out how to get better drivers for my card than what i have from the basic install, but having broken my system twice i'm now wary of trying to install any driver. Even the opensource driver caused me problems

Thanks and regards from
Tom :)

Have you looked here: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

To install a new driver, most likely you would have to purge the old one first.

Ahah, no i hadn't tried that. On their site there it says "The Linux ATI Catalyst™ driver will only be supported in Linux distributions prior to February 2009" so it looks like all linux distros are being forced to drop support for these excellent graphics cards. Seems odd.

I couldn't complete the download because i only have 1.4Gb of free space on that drive which isn't enough apparently! lol All-in-all i am really unhappy with ati right now.

Thanks Andre for trying to help me with this.
Thanks and regards from
Tom :)

Hmmm, it was trying to download to my /tmp folder which somehow has managed to move to a different space somewhere with only 1Mb of free-space left on it. I really don't remember moving it and haven't a clue where it is. Anyway. Looks like i might be able to install the driver now.

Thanks and regards from
Tom :)

"Try df -h" to see what your file system usage is.

Time for an "# apt-get clean" and an "# apt-get autoremove".

Cheer up, your ATI card will still work. I prefer the route nVidia have taken by having a universal driver for all their cards.

nVidia cards seem to have had 2 groups working on OpenSource drivers resulting in 3 different drivers; one proprietary, one properly OpenSource and one hybrid from when nVidia tried to collaborate with proper linux developers but couldn't quite wrap their heads around the advantages of OpenSource. Compared to that ati seem miles behind.

Thanks for the "df -h" it looks useful but just added to the mystery for me. Although it shows the mount points it doesn't seem to explain why the size of some of those folders are limited to 1007M which seems to be mis-labelled as it suggests Mb which would be plenty of room. the M seems to mean Kb instead?

Filesystem Size Used ......... Avail . Use% . Mounted on
/dev/sda3 11G . 8.9G ..... 821M . 92% . /
tmpfs .............. 1007M ..... 0 .... 1007M .. 0% .. /lib/init/rw
varrun ............. 1007M . 104K .. 1007M .. 1% .. /var/run
varlock ............ 1007M .. 0 ..... 1007M .. 0% .. /var/lock
udev ............... 1007M . 168K .. 1007M .. 1% .. /dev
tmpfs .............. 1007M . 140K . 1007M .. 1% ... /dev/shm
lrm .................. 1007M . 2.4M . 1004M .. 1% ... /lib/modules/2.6.28-11-generic/volatile
/dev/sda1 6.6G . 6.1G .... 551M . 92% . /media/disk

My ati card is kinda working but only if i avoid drivers. The text is a little blurry but at the resolution and size i use that really isn't going to cause eye-strain lol

Anyway, thanks Andre :)
Regards from
Tom :)

To get further information on "df" and its options, use "man df" in a terminal. The "-h" option renders the output into humanly readable format and it is the percentages that give an immediate idea as to where usable space has been gobbled up. "du" is similar.

It looks like your partitions are the standard two partitions of "/" and "swap". Next time you freshly install Ubuntu, you might like to consider partitioning "/home" as well. That way you can retain your Home directory (on its own partition) when freshly installing a new version of Ubuntu.

Currently, it looks like you need to do some house keeping - your "/" partition is almost full. Remember not to rely too much on the GBs displayed because they depend on the mathematics used (see: http://www.lyberty.com/encyc/articles/kb_kilobytes.html)

As an aside, you have often mentioned that "most of us dual boot with Windows" - could you let me have a copy of the research paper that supports this please ;-)

Andre

Heheheh, 'us' is such an imprecise term - i was wondering how long it would take for this assertion to be challenged and i've been amazed how long i've been 'getting away with it' lol.

I'd be vaguely interested if there are any stats for numbers of linux-users with a dual-boot (or multi-boot) and which other OS's they dual-booted with, other linux distros, Bsd, Mac, Unix and Windows. How that breaks down by length of time users have been using linux; first week, first month, first year with linux - does the Windows option fall away with time? Also % of linux-users buying a returnable machine keeping the Windows (or other pre-installed OS) as part of a dual-boot, compared perhaps with people being refused the returns policy or tech support because of wiping the pre-installed OS. A different break-down by expertise with linux, or by expertise with hardware might be interesting but more difficult to judge, ie am i more of an expert with Ubuntu because my karma points are higher? (Obviously i'm not but that might not be obvious to some people). I don't think it's a study worth doing with much seriousness nor attempt at accuracy but it might be a bit of fun for someone.

I think people need to be given confidence in going for a dual-boot rather than perhaps feeling forced to wipe Windows as linux-fanboyism or the Windows world seem to demand as being the only way. Discovering that dual-boot is a legitimate option and is strongly advocated by 'some' 'experts' in the linux world is something that helped me have the confidence to move away from Windows at my own pace.

Thanks Andre :))) I think you deserve extra karma for being the first to challenge me on that :))) heheheh
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Oooops, that looks all wrong. Andre is not a fanboy as that last post suggested, well not in the derogatory way the term is usually used.

No offence taken.