Video drivers (23:43 -0700)

For the past few Linux distro releases, I've found the most painful part of running Linux on the desktop to be video drivers. (It used to be wireless. But since NetworkManager made dealing with wireless mostly painless, except for the lack of any setup option for it in Fedora's installer, it's now video. Even counting the few regressions in the updates since FC6's release.)

My requirements are more than the median user's, but they're really not that complicated. I have an IBM T42 laptop with a 1400x1050 display. At work, I plug it into a dock that is connected to a 1920x1200 LCD monitor. I want to get the benefits of this monitor's high resolution when I'm at work.

With Fedora Core 4, I lived with what the open source drivers could offer. I prefer to stick to the open source drivers for a number of reasons. First, I'm more comfortable using software if I know people can read the source, even if I'm not the one doing the reading. Second, I've found using proprietary drivers tends to make my system less stable. This isn't surprising given what I've said about extensions and quality. And third, I'd like to improve the Linux desktop experience -- and that involves understanding it. If Linux on the desktop is ever to be taken seriously for the average user, the desktop Linux experience is what you're going to get when you install the distribution, without any hard-to-find and hard-to-install proprietary drivers.

This meant that I used my LCD monitor via the DVI port on my laptop's dock, but at 1400x1050 resolution.

But then, when I upgraded to Fedora Core 5, things got worse. My memory is that this was because they disabled part of the support for the driver because it crashed on some other variants of the card (although I can't find my source for that anymore). Worse in this case means that there was no longer any video output from my docking station. This pushed me to switch to the proprietary drivers from ATI.

Thanks to packaging done by Livna, this was actually reasonably painless (once I discovered Livna). I could power my DVI output again. I could even display at 1920x1200 (as long as the monitor was plugged in when I started X), and resize the display using xrandr when docking and undocking. I even had some extra hardware acceleration capabilities, although that stopped when I upgraded to Fedora Core 6, and I don't think they made a difference for anything I actually used (except for screensavers). I lost the ability to suspend-to-disk, but suspend-to-RAM still worked, and that was the main thing that mattered to me.

But after using Fedora Core 6 for a bit, I started (after some of the updates) running into problems on suspend/resume, where my computer would hang on resume. I reduced this to an upgrade in the proprietary ATI video drivers, which forced me into a cycle of avoiding ATI driver updates, which eventually forced me into avoiding kernel security updates, which wasn't a good idea.

But I found a solution for that problem. I now run the proprietary ATI drivers without the associated kernel module. The drivers work fine: I get all the functional benefits of the proprietary drivers without the stability or suspend/resume problems. Every time I get updated rpms from Livna, I just rpm -e --nodeps kmod-fglrx.

So I started thinking that the next time I get a laptop, I should make sure to get one with the Intel Graphics Card, since Intel is nice enough to develop their accelerated driver as an open-source driver. Unfortunately, Lenovo only sells that graphics card in laptops with a 1024x768 display; the 1400x1050 displays require the ATI card.

Last week I wrote a simple python script (works on my system only) to automate the stuff I do on dock / undock. However, it's managed to crash my X server twice; hopefully the sleep(1) will fix that by making things more like they used to be before it was automated.

But I'm somewhat pessimistic about whether this situation will improve, since most of the Linux developer types I run into seem to use the proprietary drivers. If nobody uses the free drivers, they'll never improve. Then again, who am I to talk? Maybe I should give them another try once F7 comes out.