I lost another hour to Linux today…
Published by vladimir January 22nd, 2008 in Mozilla(or, "If I only had a nickel...")
I needed a permanent Linux machine to do some recent bugs; I have a Mac Mini here that's been a champion for the past few months, triple-booting between Linux, OSX, and Windows XP. But, lately, I've been needing to switch between Windows XP and Linux quickly, so I decided to fire up this Dell Dimension 8100 I've had sitting next to me (powered off) for a while. I figure it was old enough (over a year, maybe more?) that there should be no problems. Alas, it wasn't to be. I installed Ubuntu 7.10; I got some display corruption in the installer, but that went away when I rebooted the installer in "safe graphics mode". That really should've been a warning to stay away, but I figured that it was just some quirk of the installer and it'll fix itself.
So. Things install and boot up. The display is in 1680x1050 instead of 1920x1200, but I don't care. This machine has a Radeon X300 SE in it, nowhere near the latest and greatest. I figure, ok, I'll install fglrx; people have been telling me how things are looking up for ATI's driver since AMD took them over. (Which isn't hard -- it's not hard to improve when you've been releasing a terrifyingly awful driver for years.) Enable restricted drivers in ubuntu, fglrx gets installed, I reboot, great! Everything looks good.
But there's a twist. (Ahem.) My monitor is rotated 90 degrees; this is my secondary monitor that sits to the left of my main one. On the Mac Mini (using Intel's drivers), a simple "xrandr -o left" fixed things up nicely. Not so much here. fglrx hasn't heard of XRandR. Okay, let's give up on fuglyrx; clearly there's been loads of hype and very little substance there. I don't care about 3D accel at this point, I just want something that works, so I can get on with my work. I go back to the radeon driver. Woo, xrandr shows multiple supported rotations! Ok, a simple "xrandr -o left" and.... well, the display gets rotated. Half of it gets corrupted. Moving windows around is measured in seconds per frame. This isn't going to work.
Then I proceed to fiddle with Xorg configs, thinking how could this possibly not work, there must at least be a simple way to force a rotation in xorg.conf.. but after about 20 minutes of going through random wiki pages, mailing list archives, etc., I realize I have better things to do.
So, instead, I'm going to go back to either running Linux in a VM, or setting up Xvnc and using that as my X server (which, of course, means I don't get RENDER... hmm, maybe I'll have to use Xephyr and xserver-vnc or something). If anyone wants to know why working with Linux on the desktop is a pain in the ass, here's a good start.
Oh, and sound doesn't work.
32 Comments to “I lost another hour to Linux today…”
- 1 Trackback on Jan 27th, 2008 at 12:34 am
Just to clarify, you didn’t lose an hour to “Linux”, you lost an hour to hardware vendors that don’t participate in the open source process.
i had a similar experience with Fedora Core 8/PPC on the weekend on my PowerBook G4: There was no video signal on the DVI port, only the notebook display worked (but at least with all the eye-candy!), and no chance to get the wireless LAN working.
The funny thing is: This is the kind of experience that I’ve been having with GNU/Linux for more than 10 years now, and it just does not matter how old the computers are that I am trying to run with Tux. That and the lack of software for my needs always drives me back to OS X and Windows.
Life is easier - and more productive - when you admit defeat and stick with the proprietary systems.
Why are you blaming Linux for bad drivers? This is just yet another example of the dangers of binary-blob drivers. Still, I’ve had no problems with Linux here so your claims about desktop Linux being a “pain in the ass” is BS.
Did you try System > Administration > Screens & Graphics?
Move along, nothing to see here.
Who would have thought writing drivers for hardware that you don’t have the specifications for would be hard work and remain unfinished? Damn those developers who volunteer their time for not working fast enough to appease the author. It’s also not surprising that ATI/AMD’s Linux driver is still crap, it’s been crap for years and new ownership can’t fix the obviously incompetent (software) engineers who fill the ranks of ATI.
Wow, what a surprisingly refreshing response from the Linux gearheads!
Normally, you reserve the finger-pointing for the complete newbies, but here you have a pretty savvy user, and STILL manage to insult him by insinuating that he is ungrateful for simply wanting something that ‘works’.
For the last couple of years, I keep getting told that linux is ‘ready’ for the desktop. It doesn’t matter who is to blame. Hardware vendors, license issues, 2.4 vs. 2.6 kernel incompatibilities, IT DOESN’T MATTER. It either works or it doesn’t.
So, to help everyone out, here is a general rule re: linux support for the unwashed masses.
1 - When you want a feature or function, code it yourself.
2 - When the feature isn’t configured the way you want, find a nice HOWTO.
3 - When the feature doesn’t work as advertised, find someone to blame (preferably the evil closed-source people).
4 - When all else fails, go to #1
Of course, these rules are only valid if written in perl, and run as a daemon.
Are you people serious? Users don’t give a crap why their system doesn’t work. The commenter’s attitudes here show exactly why Linux continues to fail.
Then don’t use it. YOu don’t need linux and linux does not need you
Steve, I want to thank you for helping me make my point. We are indeed dealing with a savvy user, who should (and probably does) know why support for ATI cards is crap. Because of this I think the tone of the responses match the tone of the rant: smug.
The idea that Linux is somehow flawed because it doesn’t support all hardware out of the box is asinine. Have any of you Vladimir apologists even tried to install Windows on modern hardware? Good luck even getting the SATA controller working. Windows has the shittiest selection of drivers out of the box, but unlike Vladimir, I don’t want to beat a dead horse.
Stuart, Linux is succeeding and if the ATI graphics drivers had spent the last 5 years working from specs instead of reverse engineering the cards, I have no doubt and history shows that we would have excellent drivers.
Of course there are many drawbacks in open source operating systems, because of a massive lack of documentation. But there is also a massive bunch of this crappy attitude ‘Users don’t give a crap why their system doesn’t work’ because you have to learn day by day. You have to learn how to drive a car and you have to learn certain noises which indicate some faulty behaviour at this car. And you will learn it, because it can be lethal. You have to learn not to use a hair blower in the water and so on. Why are people so ignorant learning an operating system?
“why working with Linux on the desktop is a pain in the ass” Simple, when you buy a Mac you buy a machine already tested with that software configuration, someone suffered that pain in the ass for you, when you buy a new PC with Windows preinstalled, another group of people did the work for you, go and buy for example a new Laptop with Linux preinstalled like the new Thinkpads or many other on the market and you will notice the difference. Even running Windows XP on a Mac already is a tested platform by Apple. Try running OSX on a no tested platform, o you can’t, or go and install a new XP (no the supplied factory defaults CD) on a new empty laptop and you will have those pains too
Linux does “just work” when you have the right support from all parties involved. I’ve been running Linux for many years and don’t have that many problems running a desktop machine anymore. It’s definitely improved.
What I don’t understand is how people can praise a product like Mozilla’s Firefox (10 years, baby!) for it’s great work for being open source and then saying linux sucks because there is hardware that doesn’t have proper support due to closed-source development (specifically on hardware in this case).
Imagine if the “web” was a closed source, proprietary product like most hardware development is. Would Mozilla have stood the chance it did if it had to reverse engineer the protocol and constantly work uphill against changing standards? It would probably would still be around, but it wouldn’t be the thriving, vibrant example of what open source can do that it is today. Stuck in the mire of constantly working against proprietary systems it would not have been able to spend as much time working on the important things to make their product usable and feature-rich.
That’s what’s going on with Linux right now - there’s a lot of great things, but you can’t blame “Linux” for not having support for proprietary hardware that hardware vendors won’t support.
I don’t think anyone is claiming Linux doesn’t have problems with random pieces of hardware. Life would be a *lot* easier if we only had to support specific hardware, like Apple can do. Or if we were so widely deployed that everyone had to write drivers, like for Windows.
Thanks for experimenting Linux and Free Software though! Things *have* generally been improving though (e.g. ATI open source), so it will hopefully be worth trying again at a later time.
You need a recent (meaning at most 5 days old) git snapshot of the radeon driver and xorg-server 1.4.0.90. Rotation acceleration just went in, I’ve been using it on my RV370 and it’s stable.
I have to agree with Stuart and Steve.
> Damn those developers who volunteer their time for not working fast enough to appease the author.
Sorry, John, but you do realize that a lot of the X developers actually get paid for their work, right? They’re not all volunteers. Just like the Mozilla developers aren’t all volunteers, many get paid. Same with OpenOffice. Just because something is Free Software, doesn’t mean it is written by volunteers.
This is one of the many real problems Linux faces, it doesn’t matter who’s fault it is - it’s still there, and until it gets fixed, it’s a barrier to entry.
Here, mandatory screenshot: http://img138.imageshack.us/my.php?image=rotationcx6.jpg
There’s lot of work going on in the ati free drivers world, and for lot of work I mean that there’s something new every week and everything keeps working better and better. By the way, you need to set EXA instead of XAA.
Hmm…why not just turn the monitor on its side? Might catch some new Cairo bugs that way :-)
Linux video drivers are hell on earth. Once spent most of a day trying to figure out why I couldn’t get my desktop to extend onto multiple monitors. Still doesn’t work. Worked the first time on Windows.
I second the “linux video drivers are hell on earth.” My laptop has integrated Intel video goodness and under Windows it works just fine. Recently, the i810 driver for X was updated and scrolling threads in Gmail is now “chunk…. chunk…. chunk….”. Roll back to the old i810 mode and it’s fast but no RENDER extension for good anti-aliased fonts. Turns out Gmail has a div on the lower right with the “next author” name there and that was the cause.
At least Intel is on board with Linux more these days so the improvements should come but I don’t think Linux is ever going to be “desktop ready” for the level of user that rotates their display :).
Sorry, Jeff, but in the case of this post we really are talking about volunteers. None of the developers spending thankless hours reverse engineering ATI cards are being payed to do it. This isn’t an Xorg issue, it’s a driver issue. Why Vladimir feels justified in smugly bashing their hard work is beyond me.
For all the people saying that the problem is just proprietary hardware specs…. My last Linux kernel upgrade (which was from a 2.4 kernel to 2.6, so switched from OSS to ALSA sound drivers) made sound stop working. This wasn’t a case of fancy unsupported graphics hardware, but a basic ens1371 sound chip (nothing proprietary there), which used to be supported, and then support got dropped.
The distribution passed the buck to ALSA, ALSA didn’t do anything about it… and that’s where the whole thing died, a year and a half ago.
When it works, Linux is great, but any hardware change or OS upgrade is liable to make it stop working, in my experience. Of course distributions have an upgrade treadmill from hell, so either you end up using an unsupported “old” distribution or you risk having random hardware stop working when you upgrade. Not a good choice to subject users to.
Which is why my next machine is likely to be a Mac, especially if I can find a way to configure the window manager behavior more than I’ve found so far.
(LOL at the typical fanboyish replies.)
I’ve been down this path before, quite a few times. Yes, part of the problem is that video card vendors have made it tremendously difficult for the community to write drivers. But the other part of the problem is that configuring X and trying to figure out why something isn’t working is a *nightmare*. You’re forced to wade through arcane error logs and config files, and there’s a small mountain of configuration utilities that all do slightly different things with varying degrees of fail. It’s not as bad as it was in the past, and for many users things are even automatically detected and configured correctly… But if they’re not, “sucks to be you”.
I recommend VMware. For MoCo QA, we have VMs for Fedora Core 7 and 8, Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10, and many others. Since most of us are working on Macs (which you can’t virtualize anyway), we just fire these up in VMware when we need to do unix work and things generally work pretty well.
“IT DOESN’T MATTER. It either works or it doesn’t.”
Linux just works… if you buy compatible hardware. I mean, OS X doesn’t install on PC hardware either.
You need a recent (meaning at most 5 days old) git snapshot of the radeon driver and xorg-server 1.4.0.90. Rotation acceleration just went in, I’ve been using it on my RV370 and it’s stable.
No, it it’s not. I should append this post to say 1.5 hours lost now, but whatever. Upgraded to ubuntu hardy to get 1.4.0.90, just built the ati driver from git. Same problem when rotating. (I really should know better by now, but I keep having this irrational hope.)
Hi. I’m sorry to hear that, I can assure you that everything works here, just check this screencast (and consider that running recordmydesktop slows things a bit)! Are you using EXA instead of XAA? It’s important to set EXA. Also, are you using desktop effects (compiz)? I don’t, so that could be the problem.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6C361MSL
you really don’t know what you’re talking about, this article is 100% BS!
You should be able to configure the rotation in xorg.conf.
First you’d need to add a line like the following to the driver section:
Option “monitor-VGA0″ “vga-monitor”
(assuming that xrandr reported that output as “VGA0″).
Then set up a second monitor section with that name, and add the following option:
Option “Rotate” “left”
That won’t help you with the acceleration problem though: it might be easier to manually rotate the monitor :)
Try Suse.. It seems my friends in the linux community need to create a new distro every single time someone gets bored. Rather than make the major distros beeter they brach off and create crap like Ubuntu..
It’s really simple: Linux works, ATI drivers don’t. Go and call ATI.
As an user, you don’t have to go and search any log to see why unsupported video drivers doesn’t work, they just doesn’t.
BTW I have a cheap bt8×8 card that never worked in Windows XP, I can’t even search a log because there are no logs where I can have a clue.
Good on you Vladimir for trying, and taking the time to give us all the details.
My one statement on Linux is that if it didn’t already exist someone would have to invent it.
And on the technical front, I came across the thread while trying to make acceleration happen with a rotated external monitor on my IBM/Lenovo T41 running debian/unstable. Turns out that changing to EXA acceleration as per Giacomo’s suggestion simply meant that I got no acceleration on either screen. Looking at the log, which I haven’t saved (since gone back to XAA acceleration) so can’t quite precisely I saw something along the lines of ‘Acceleration enabled for R100′ which might explain the lack of acceleration on my Mobility 7500.
Peace.
exactly. linux is not ready for the desktop.
i just installed the latest ubuntu on my dell m610. just like you said, graphical installer didn’t work, used the text. that went fine. reboot, x starts, blank screen. manually edit the xorg.conf, set my resolution. restartx, yea! i can see!
lets get on the internet… nope. no wireless. hrm. broadcom. hrm. wiki. forum. wiki. forum. kinda got it working, reboot to see if it STAYS working… nope.
linux on the desktop sucks, regardless of drivers.
oh and mike: “OS X doesn’t install on PC hardware either” because its not PC software, nerd.
Hey, I’ve had some similar issues on my Ubuntu tablet. I want to let you know:
1) I _fixed_ the bloody “seconds per frame” rotation lag problem thingy! Hooray! …The same thing might work for you, I’d just have to spend some time recounting the steps, aaaagh. Somebody here mentioned EXA, and that’s exactly right! To get _that_ working, I needed to build a recent Git snapshot of Mesa. To get _that_ working, I practically had to get a degree in computer science. But! It was fun, and hopefully I’ll be able to help other lost souls find their way through the harsh development period that Linux rotation is (sadly, still) in. If you want me to recount the process, send me an E-mail!
2) I’m having the same “can’t see half the screen” problem, waaaah! Except, half my screen is _blank._ If you find out any more of this, please tell me! (Those other than Vladimir: you can leave a comment on my website, or something…)
3) I’m pretty sad that this thread devolved into a flamewar. I love Linux to bits, believe me, but I know it has flaws, and recognizing those flaws is key to making Linux even better! The correct term for Linux’s desktop-readiness is “rough around the edges.” I can’t blame people for being nervous about Linux for their high-end rigs. I’ve been pulling teeth getting various things on my compy to work under Linux, but I’m geek-inclined and I can learn to do those things, and it’s fun to be so hands-on with your computer, and I know not everybody thinks like that, or has time to tinker forever. I hope that by learning these complicated things, I can hasten the day when my knowledge will no longer be needed for the everyday user.
Thank you!