Open Source ATI on it’s way
I just had the chance to checkout the fairly new Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Alpha3 for testing it with ATI/AMD r700 (in my case Ati Radeon 4830) compatibility. With FGLRX there was and is a lot of stress. Fedora 12 already brought some light but you had to install some experimental sources. (all citations from private blog).
The result is impressive. Yes it's an alpha version, but the Ati Driver runs out the box. With Kernel Mode Switching (KMS) and Compiz with moderate memory consumption (in contrast to FGLRX). Also window minimizing/maximizing/resizing and Ctrl+Alt+F1-Text-Console switching is fast and seems stable. Phoronix has some benchmark about the poor 3D performance in contrast to FGLRX but I think this will be a matter of time. A bit more annoying is the absence of modern OpenGL2.0+ features, so it is not really possible to do GLSL hacking with these driver yet. I don't know whether we can get Powerball running on it, but anyway no one has time doing something on it in the moment. The X11 driver git-trunk has some GLSL2.0 features already, it's just unclear whether the Ubuntu Team will put it into Lucid Lynx as it will be a Long Term Release (LTS).
For fans, there is also a new theme:
(Image from Ubuntus gallery)
Boot loader mess
One thing I really dislike on Ubuntu/Desktop Linux. Each time I reinstall something, e.g. Windows7 (because Vista/32 was to buggy and cannot really work with 8gb of RAM and I need something to start C&C Generals you know). Anyway each time, the boot loader gets shot. Ok; thats Windows fault. But how do I easyly repair that? The web is full of easy-to-hardrange installation tutorials; but why not a simple button "repair my fuxxing boot loader" on the CD?. Now, when you use the wrong disc (a Ubuntu 9.10 disc instead of 9.04 - wrong labeled) it installs - without any message or something - grub2. Naturally incompatible with grub1 installed by all Ubuntu all the versions before. The first sign that something went wrong is a Grub minimal bash like shell telling you something.
So, for fast remembering; how to reinstall grub:
# boot from any recent OS CD, start terminal, get root # exchange /dev/sdb1 through the partition you installed you root ubuntu system # /dev/sda should be standard as target partition for grub mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/bla mount -o bind /dev /mnt/bla/dev mount -o bind /proc /mnt/bla/proc cd /mnt/bla chroot ./ grub-install /dev/sda
Useful things StackOverflow
Useful discussions on StackOverflow found in the last time:
- Recursive Locks vs. Non-Recursive Locks
- How do I recover a semaphore when the process that decremented it to zero crashes?. The solution with file locks seems to be good. Maybe file mapping / file locks should replace SharedMemory/Semaphore Combinations anyway.
2nd Amarok 1.4 Fork
Now therea re two Amarok 1.4 Clones. Let's see when they will outstrip Amarok2 
Nummer 1: Pana
Nummer 2: Clementine Player
P.S. About KDE4: When you install 'kile' on a previous Gnone-only-Ubuntu; you have to fetch 700MB(!) of data. And you won't get any spellchecker. That's fixed with KDE 4.4 through backports. (Hey, they did not had a spellchecker in a text editor for ALL these time??)