On Friday 05 June 2009 22:06:34 Andrew Joakimsen wrote:
My main machine I upgraded openSUSE 11.0 -> 11.1 without any problems. There were issues with the ATI drivers that caused me to do a clean install, but that did not resolve the issue. So I lived with jerky screensavers for about a month and now the newest ATI driver in the repository doesn't lock up the machine!
On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 19:14, Dan Kegel
wrote: I'm trying to decide whether depending on LSB 3.2 is going to cut out a lot of users. How far along are folks on moving to OpenSuse 11.1? Or are a large fraction of users still on older versions of OpenSuse? Are these statistics available anywhere? Thanks, Dan
Andrew hit the nail on the head! If you have an older ATI card (older than the 2400 Series), then you no longer have driver support from ATI. ATI dropped all support for all users of *all* previous cards. The problem is that on many of the older *legacy* cards, the last working driver was the 8-9 release (Ver. 8.532) which has no support for xorg 7.4 (the version packaged with 11.1). On many older cards the 8-10 through 9-3 (the last driver with legacy support) drivers simply "do not work." For example, (my situation) if you have ATI hardware that doesn't work with the 9.3 driver -- you are hosed and you are stuck using 11.0 until you upgrade your graphics card. Otherwise, you will have *no fglrx* driver to use in 11.1. If you have a laptop -- you are just hosed. You must stay with 11.0 or upgrade and switch to the radeonhd driver. The radeonhd driver is getting much better and works fine, but face it, performance is still about 20-50% of what you get with the fglrx driver. Additionally, for laptop users, the downclocking/powerdown capabilities of the radeonhd driver are still in work and the lack of downclocking can cause your laptop to run extremely hot -- solely due to the heat produced by the ATI gpu without the proprietary downclocking and unused chip circuitry powerdown provided by the fglrx driver. Running the radeonhd driver on my Toshiba laptop causes such extreme heat production, I can fry eggs on the palm rest. (literally, I have to lift my hands off the palm rest continually to avoid the heat: 96-97 deg. F palm rest temp and Left Fan Discharge: 147 Deg. F) [The left fan discharge is just below the palm rest] That's with: Option "ForceLowPowerMode" Option "LowPowerModeEngineClock" "140000" Using the fglrx driver, there is no heat problem on the palm rest and the Left Fan Discharge temp drops to 122 deg. F. (That's a 25 deg. F drop just due to gpu chipset power control) So for my laptop situation, with a legacy card that will not work with the 9-3 release, I am stuck using 11.0 until EOL, and by then I will have a new laptop with an NVIDIA gpu in it. With that background, the answer to your question is simple. If you are not affected by a hardware issue that requires you stay with 11.0, then by all means run 11.1. If you are stuck running 11.0, you can still install the latest and greatest KDE desktop, and all of the other latest apps. So the actual "difference" between running 11.0 or 11.1 to the end user is nothing more than a kernel version difference. If your hardware doesn't require any new feature only available in the 11.1 kernel, then the release choice really becomes a "who cares" issue aside from the EOL support time remaining. (which is in itself is increasingly more of a "who cares" issue due to bug fix times and priority) So check your hardware, pick a release number, pop the DVD in the tray and reboot ;-) Both 11.0 and 11.1 are fine (10.3 still works great for that matter) -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org