VirtuAlexPress

So, I have upgraded to Fedora 10. At first it worked fine, but after last week’s update to a new snapshot of nouveau it chose to ignore my dual head setup. The second monitor works but only as a clone, no matter what. Hence I’m back to the evil kmod-nvidia. I’ve tried to enable desktop effects only to find out that it is even less stable now. After reboot the window decorations were gone. Disabling desktop effects restores everything to normal, but after that it can’t even enable desktop effects any more.

I also forced to use proprietary driver on my IBM laptop for similar reason. It has ati video card though and runs Ubuntu. The free driver runs fine there until I need to use s-video out. It does turn it on and extends desktop onto it, but when I try to play any video it just shows black framebuffer. Proprietary driver is much less convenient. I have not found a way to turn s-video on on demand other than restarting X. Then it detects load and clones display. I’m not sure if there’s a way span it to a separate desktop either. But it works for the purpose. As I have to relogin anyway, I’ve created a separate user with appropriate screen resolution to watch video. I did not try to connect a separate display though. Maybe that would be pain in the arse.

The only device which works without evil proprietary video drivers is my IBM tablet. That is because it has intel video card. But it is too tiny to my taste for everyday use. I just take it with me when I travel.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 7:57 am and is filed under Linux, System Administration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.