When I first got this computer from Dell I fully intended to make ubuntu my primary OS. I got the computer, popped in the install CD and poof! I had a computer with one of the best OS’s on the planet (IMHO).
Since I had installed Feisty (7.04) I wanted to check out the new compiz desktop effects that came bundled with this release. I quickly found out that I wouldn’t be able to simply “click a button” to get these effects.
See, when I bought my computer I failed to understand that it came with an ATI Radeon graphics card. D’oh! I was even further ignorant of the fact that ATI doesn’t play nice with Linux. Why you little … !
So, in order to enable these cool compiz effects I would have to create an XGL session and log in to it instead of a Gnome session. Unfortunately this was a less-than-ideal way to run my computer. It was buggy, the screen would sometimes just freeze and I’d have to hard restart my computer. I lost many a cool graphic I was working on in The Gimp.
But now, now, I no longer have to deal with that crap. I had a little money come in today from some ads on this site and I sprung for an Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 256MB graphics card. It’s a dirt-cheap low end card but it works very well for my purposes because I do very very little gaming other than Starcraft. Thank you Nvidia!
I’m just so glad that I never have to deal with ATI again.
