Hi, I have a F7 box using an ATI 1600 board. I am happy with the board but confused about drivers. When I set up F7 I added Livna as a repository. I currently have the ATI catalyst 8.42.3 driver. I would like to be able to use the hardware on the video card to get smooth graphics in normal desktop use. When F7 was first set up the default desktop graphics stank. No fancy stuff, either, just moving and resizing windows routinely did not give smooth motion. Scrolling text worked better, but not what I hoped. I basically think a modern computer (a dual core opteron with 2G RAM) should be able to do better than a 386 DOS box and maybe it did but it was a close thing. Using the instructions at http://www.fedorafaq.org/f7/#radeon I made some headway. I don't know any good simple test suite for measuring graphics capability in Fedora, so for lack of some better metric I used glxgears to see how many frames I'd get. Well, after initial install I got about 600 fps. Then I used the ATI driver and got about 5000 fps. The subjective view more or less corresponds to what you'd expect from this ratio. I have not been able to enable desktop effects. I don't know why, when I click on the deceptively labelled button that says, "enable desktop effects" what I get instead is a lot of screen wiggling and a highly informative error message that says, "desktop effects could not be enabled." True no doubt, but less useful than I would have wished. Yesterday I downloaded and burned an iso of mandriva 2008 one (a live cd), just to see. After figuring out that the terminal was called Konsole I ran glxgears and got a figure of about 10,000 fps. The desktop came up with desktop effects enabled by default and everything was pretty smooth. I have in the past tried quite hard to figure out what is the best free driver setup to use and to actually install and use one. But the performance of what I could achieve was pathetic and the process was painful. Do people have opinions about 1 a good simple test of graphics capabilities for a Fedora install? 2 the likelihood that Fedora will have comparable performance to Mandriva (or any other similar distribution) any time soon? 3 Is the ATI disclosure of their software internals going to result in the RadeonHD driver getting better? or when? Many thanks. Dave -- There is no single government agency that views sustainability through a broad lens, taking into account the values of the people affected by government decisions. Any model of sustainability that is driven solely by an economi engine is deficient if it is incapable of taking into account social values. Mr. Justice David Vickers, BC Supreme Court in Tsilhqot'in Nation v. British Columbia,2007
