Just a heads up for anyone who cares. The presto test repositories for Fedora at http://lesloueizeh.com have been removed. They were only available for Fedora Core 6 – Fedora 10, which have all been EOL’d.

The official Fedora repositories have been carrying deltarpms since Fedora 11, so there was no longer any reason to keep the test repositories around.

The CentOS 5 presto repositories are still available and will be until the CentOS project enables deltarpms for their repositories (if they ever do).

Trash cans credit: trash can lids and handles by shooting brooklyn under CC BY-NC 2.0

Last May I bought an ATI Radeon HD4830 video card for my music/gaming system. I would have gone with nVidia, but my last laptop had an nVidia graphics driver and I got quite frustrated with trying to keep the binary drivers up-to-date on it (even using RPM Fusion, I would run into odd problems every now and then).

I wanted a card that would have open drivers. Now, I knew when I bought the 4830 that it wasn’t supported by the open radeon driver, but I also knew it would be ready soon, and I figured I could use the closed drivers until then.

And that’s when I found out that ATI’s closed-source binary Catalyst driver is so poorly maintained, it makes Windows 95 look up-to-date. It took several months for AMD/ATI to put out a Catalyst driver that would support Fedora 11, and they still haven’t put out a Catalyst driver that supports Fedora 12.

The driver also is extremely buggy. Any release after 9.8 wouldn’t work with my original motherboard (see this bug), and after upgrading to a new Intel motherboard and processor a couple of weeks ago, I had random crashes that ranged from once every couple of days to once every fifteen minutes.

If I could ssh into the computer (which was only about half of the time), I’d see some message about an “ASIC hang”. Googling it didn’t give much information. I originally thought it had something to do with the power supply, but even a brand name power supply didn’t fix the problem.

Yesterday, I finally had enough. I wiped the hard drive and did a clean install of Fedora 12. Yeah, Catalyst won’t work, but I’d been hearing good things about mesa-drivers-experimental, so I decided to give it a go.

So, first the down side to switching:

• Nexuiz runs much slower. With the binary drivers, I was able to run the game at 1920×1080 ultimate quality at 50-60 fps. With the experimental driver, it’s down to 3-4 fps (though medium quality works great at 50-60 fps).
• XBMC ProjectM visualizations are slow. Again, with the binary drivers, the ProjectM visualizations ran at full speed, while with the experimental drivers, they run at 5-6 fps.

But, the good news is:

• I can play my 3D games just fine. Even though I can’t run them at full quality, I can still play my games.
• XBMC movies run at full speed. Even with the cool effects that XBMC uses for its controls, movies work perfectly.
• XBMC slideshows work fine, with panning and zooming. The slideshow work the way they are supposed to with no delays at all. In fact, I may be imagining it, but I think there was the occasional slight delay in catalyst that isn’t there now
• THE SYSTEM DOESN’T HANG/CRASH. I haven’t had a single system hang since switching. And that is worth far more to me than the best Nexuiz framerate ever.

Using the open experimental drivers brings me back to the reason I bought ATI in the first place, and I can finally say that I’m glad I bought ATI. Binary drivers are a pain to keep up with, and I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with that any more. I’m hoping to see things running even better in Fedora 13.

Update: The story continues here.