Back into the Gentoo partition this evening, and things are great. The ATI driver automagically began working again, after not working when reinstalling it after a run with the open-source driver. So I updated that to the latest, before I was only getting 50 – 100 FPS with glxgears, now I get about 500 to 600 FPS with glxgears on my Radeon 9600, talk about an improvement. Now only if October’s driver would come sooner so I can have Compiz fusion running with out XGL.

After fixing the graphics issues, I moved on to getting the shared printer on mtekktux to connect on my computer, that didn’t require much effort either. Just a quick configuration of CUPS, and updating HPLIP, setting the printer as default, and Kablam! printing works.

Now came the annoying sound issues. In particular, if alsasound is not started your previous gmixer settings get lost in Gnome (probably the same way with KDE). Fixing this is simple, just add alsasound to the default run level using rc-update add alsasound default. Now on boot alsasound will launch restoring settings from the previous session (that’s if it is configured to do so, which it is by default). As things have gone good so far, I plugged in my Logitech Music Anyware USB wireless audio device. Running cat /proc/asound/cards revealed:

1 [Tra ]: USB-Audio - Logitech Music Anywhere USB Tra
Logitech Logitech Music Anywhere USB Tra at usb-0000:00:1d.2-1, full speed

ALSA found it! So it was time to test to see if it works, and sure enough it does. The remote doesn’t work (yet), but that’s because Audacious doesn’t hook into the multimedia hotkey functions yet. For something that does not claim Linux support, having the major function of it work is success by any standard.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

It sounds like AMD will follow Intel’s lead in opening up their graphics processors for open source driver development. Today they released full specifications, no strings attached (in the form of NDAs that is). This comes after last week’s announcement that the new fglrx will offer a major improvement in performance for Linux users. As my computer has a obsolete Radeon 9600, I await the day when running Compiz Fusion is possible without the use of that ugly beast known as XGL. That date is set for October should I decide to stick with the fglrx driver. Hopefully by Christmas the open-source driver will be a truly viable option (I spent three days trying to get it to work with my 9600 with no luck).

On a side note, I received over a terabyte worth of hard drives plus other computer components. This time a good portion of the drives are 7200 RPM, and I now have a back-up motherboard (exact same model as my current). Ideally, I’ll add a 250GB hard drive to mtekktux to supplement it’s 80GB drive to turn it into a media and print server. Then I’ll replace my 160GB 5400 RPM hard drive with a 250 GB 7200RPM one for my XP drive, that should shorten the load times for maps in 2142.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]