ATI fglrx driver

I got to go tough installation routine again.
It is Radeon Xpress 200 graphic adapter that is making trouble.

The open source radeon driver is OK for almost anything, specially after removing strange sized "Virtual 3840x1200" when frame rates jumped to values comparable to proprietary fglrx, but the "Almost" is a keyword here.

Despite glxgears giving nice number of the frames per second, Google Earth was like molasses, and fan would start turning in high speed almost from start, YouTube videos refused to take full screen, with Flash actually going on strike.
So, to cover those cases I attempted to install fglrx again.

First attempt was to compile driver, but that didn't work well. The ati installer didn't do the job well.

Using /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh I removed remnants of "Hard Way" installation and used procedure described in http://en.opensuse.org/ATI_Radeon_Xpress


When all was done, Google Earth was running as it should, YouTube didn't complain to run in full screen mode.

Switching distros

Reading Planet SUSE I found link to article
Switching from Ubuntu to OpenSuse .

How many people annoyed with bugs in distro that they used for a while finally give up and go elsewhere ?

I know that is not many, as it involves some time to learn new one, but I know one that moved in opposite direction and few more that have some sort of plan B that include some other distro as an option.

Smolt

Smolt got changes that makes it more user friendly, ie. GUI is improved and it's on a way to be enhanced with more very useful features. Carlos, openSUSE member, rewrote the Smolt GUI in Qt, and removed serious usability bug - not reporting user password that allows user to access his report web page on http://www.smolts.org/. Password was available only trough command line client.

More in his blog .