The lack of quality video drivers is destroying Fedora

Quoting:For those of us with laptops, it means buying a whole new laptop.

True. But on the plus side, it's much easier to find a laptop with embedded Intel graphics than it is to find a motherboard with the same. Most motherboards seem to ship with ATI embedded, if they have an embedded 3D processor at all.

Side note on graphics cards: If you use multiple monitors (or a laptop with external screen) and you can't get intel, get an (older, fully suppoted) ATI. I was just reading the gnome 2.24 release notes and found out that Nvidia doesn't support XRandR 1.2, so no good multi-monitor support. See http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2

Boo Nvidia.

The intel driver in Ubuntu Hardy and Fedora 9 is barely functional on 855GM chipsets. Messed up VTs, random lockups, and complete system freezes if you switch to the external VGA and don't have a monitor connected. It's a real downgrade from the i810 driver.

hmm, works fantastically on pendrivelinux (Mandriva), many different intel driven computers have seen that thumbdrive and the drivers (CF) have worked flawlessly every time.

Perhaps it's not the driver thats buggy, but how the distro deals with it.

It's because Ubuntu is built on Debian Testing. The intel driver in Debian used to be buggy as well, but it was fixed about two months ago. I guess Ubuntu still has the buggy version.

Quoting:Ubuntu is built on Debian Testing

Is it? I always thought it's a somewhat polished snapshot of sid...

Ubuntu pulls packages from as far upstream as Experimental.

The problem here is that none of us are doing anything exotic with our video equipment. There are only so many video cards and chipsets. There are only so many monitors with so many resolutions, refresh rates, etc.

Why is it so hard to get X to work properly and be configured automatically?

I've spent way too much time hacking at xorg.conf.

I agree with Steven. It's silly to still not have a decent graphical X configurator. I just spent some quality time with Ubuntu 8.04, and I swear it went backwards. They make it easy to install the NVidia drivers, but then when I tried to actually use them the graphical configuration thingy went wonky and disabled 3D acceleration, and set my 22" widescreen at 640x480. Mr. Magoo. 2D with the nv driver is no better- it maxes out at 1280xsomething. Silliness, when Xorg has supported high resolutions for years.

@Tuxchick

Where is the difficulty in knocking up a graphical configurator? (This is not a sarcastic question.) I assume it's the setting of the values in xorg.conf itself and not the graphical end? I could knock up something in KDevelop using Qt without too much difficulty if someone was good at the text that goes in xorg.conf. Whenever I have played with xorg.conf I have generally broken it!

Thinking about it, Mandriva has a graphics card/screen resolution program (XFdrake) that seems to work well but I don't think does dual monitors. I sometimes have to use nvidia-settings if I want to then set-up dual monitors or an external monitor with my laptop which generally works, but it can be very fiddly at times. Presumably, if you wanted something similar dual monitor-wise with non-nViidia cards, then you're into xorg.conf hacking? As in with the Acer Aspire One for example if you want to set-up for different resolutions with external monitors. Not sure how a Qt application would work on xfce. I'm rambling now...

There are two problems with graphical X configurators:

1. If a very common X configuration (like super-dumb 640x480 VGA) doesn't work, you won't get a usable interface on the program, or worse, you could lock up the system.

2. Probing the hardware for display capabilities is, shall we say, less than trustworthy.

http://www.gnome.org/~federico/news-2007-01.html#font-sizes (language warning)

What Federico doesn't mention in his comments, is that DDC is sometimes incorrectly or incompletely implemented, and sometimes it returns completely wrong values. Apparently it happens often enough to be not usable. Add to this the "reviving older hardware" option where DDC is totally unavailable, and the result is a nightmare for both developers and support people.

Quoting:2. Probing the hardware for display capabilities is, shall we say, less than trustworthy.

Exactly. We ran into this exact issue at the college when setting up a replacement control box for the digital sign. We replaced the old Acer 270 laptop with a nice little mini-computer with intel 645? graphics. X refused to read the display right. It would run the TV at 1024x768 no matter what we put in the xorg. Add to that the fact that the onboard video is actually a dual head controller and the cable has one dvi and one vga, and of course the VGA is the secondary, which is also the one we needed to use, and it was a major headache. Until I found the options to disable ddc and the first head and the commands to generate and test modelines and such. The tools are all there, there just doesn't seem to be a good graphical configurator to use them.

Quoting: Probing the hardware for display capabilities is, shall we say, less than trustworthy.

And mere mortal human users have to do this when the GUI thingy fails. So as DiBosco and techiem said, this doesn't appear to be an insurmountable problem, just a neglected one on most distributions.

Quoting:1. If a very common X configuration (like super-dumb 640x480 VGA) doesn't work, you won't get a usable interface on the program, or worse, you could lock up the system.

This starts to happen more and more as high widescreen resolution LCD screens can't display 640x480.

Hmm, I think I like the Mandriva way of doing it. You have the option of logging into the video configuration thingy instead of the desktop.

I'm getting very close to loading Mandriva or PCLinuxOS ...

Mandriva, this coming from a former PCLOS junkie. PCLOS is nice and very Mandriva-like, but the development seems to have slowed, it's not quite as stable and it doesn't have near the package list Mandriva does. I haven't even thought about reinstalling any other distro on my main laptop at home, I have been using 2008.1 since it came out six months ago...and six months is seriously about 3 times longer than the previous record!

Don't get me wrong, PCLOS is a nice distro, but Mandriva is really kicking the snot out of anything else I have tried.

Just my O.

I am a big fan of PCLOS right now, I have it dual booting with XP on my laptop and as the only OS on a desktop of mine, both have never given me so much as a hiccup. Easy to configure and easy to maintain. It has great hardware recognition and the wireless connection on my laptop has never once been an issue, unless I did it, which I have.. ;-)

Compromise: Install one or the other, run the other in a VM to try it out, too! :) They both rock, as does Mepis.

I love the idea of kicking the snot out of something!

I would echo the thoughts of rijelkentaraus, but having used Mandy since 2001 I am quite biased. ;~) PCLOS, to me, seemed like a less flexible version of Mandriva with a different package manager. I assume it doesn't have a team behind it like Mandriva does so simply doesn't have the resources to make so many improvements as Mandriva does with each release.