Just tried to upgrade to Kubuntu Jaunty from Intrepid and recognized that my 3 years old notebook is too old to be worth for ATI to be supported.
Jaunty comes with a new XServer and needs the FGLRX 9.4 drivers from ATI. However ATI stopped support for several older cards as discussed in the Ubuntu Forums. There are even some never cards affected, so in case you wish to upgrade, first make sure that FGLRX 9.4 supports your chipset.
Unfortunately the Open Source radeon driver is - in my case - way too instable to work with. I had complete X server crashes after just a couple of minutes each time I've booted.
XServer upgraded. AMD made a choice. I have a RadeonHD card and I'm really happy with that choice. I am now able to play Win game under WINE because of the changes made in XServer forced AMD to really update their driver this go around.
And if they obsolete hardware, they really should make sure that the people are aware of it, by updating the release notes and not offering false drivers, although the user is asked prior to download.
The problem here is that they apparently will not update the existing Linux drivers for comparability with the new Xorg. One might assume this policy will pose a problem for users upgrading to Windows 7 as well. However it is more critical for Linux users who upgrade OSs often even in older hardware.
It is a huge challenge to the Linux driver market. Users became dependent of manufacturer provided drivers for graphic cards. It is clear now that these drives may become unavailable at the manufacture's whim.
For my next system, should I go Intel or NVidia?
and 9600XT.I always got problems with these cards. More than a year it is a torture to setup boxes because of ATI.
Both of them can't even
give a correct resolution nor 3D 2D effects not working.
I checked my systems on a less powerful Geforce 5200, everything was wonderful.
BEWARE of AMD/ATI.
Now, it could be that nVidia does such a stupid move in the future. I'll switch my preferred brand of graphics card then to someone else.