ati drivers fail -- migrating to ubuntu

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Mon, Sep 07, 2009 at 15:38:48 -0400,
  Kevin Abbey <kevinabbey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'd am reluctantly migrating to ubuntu since ati drivers still do not
> install in fedora 9, 10, or 11.  I have tried installing the
> proprietary ati driver almost every month for the past year and a half
> with no success.

If that is your expectation, Fedora isn't the distro for you. Fedora is
not going to hold up kernel development to wait for propreitary video
drivers to be released. Both its focus on "first" and on "freedom" are
in conflict with waiting for propreitary video driver updates before updating
the kernel (or perhaps other things) that conflict with the propreitary
drivers.

Instead Fedora's plan is to use open source drivers to provide 3d
acceleration for most Intel and ATI based video. Currently there are
issues with these drivers, but they are working in some cases. In the
long run this approach is supportable, whereas depending on propreitary
drivers while trying to be leading edge, isn't.

> I hope that fedora get a new maintainer for this and coordinates
> updates with fedora and redhat and ATI,AMD.  If I find the time to

That isn't going to happen.

> Alternatively, I'll be using only NVidia cards in the future so that I
> can use fedora.

You are going to be in the same boat there, from time to time. And the
open source driver project to support nvidia's chips isn't being helped
much by nvidia, so it is going to be a long while before it supports
3d acceleration.