[gentoo-amd64] New video card, finally!

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

As regulars are aware, I /was/ running an old Radeon 92xx series card, 
r200 series chip.  My system was /relatively/ good, even if it's half a 
decade old now, because it's a dual socket Opteron, which I had upgraded 
to top-of-the-line dual-core Opteron 290s (2.8 GHz), with plenty of 
memory (8 gigs, tho it's now six as a stick went bad on me and I've not 
replaced it yet), and running four SATA drives in md/kernel RAID.

Well, a few weeks ago I switched the system partitions from RAID-6 to 
RAID-1.  In many tasks the RAID-1 is actually faster than the RAID-6 was, 
tho part of that might be that the new partitions aren't fragmented, 
yet.  While I was at it, I rid myself of the LVM2 layer I was running 
most of the non-rootfs system on.  No real issues with it here, but it 
was a bit of a hassle since I couldn't put the rootfs on it directly, and 
I have seen some horror stories I didn't like, tho whether they're 
accurate on the current LVM2 I don't know.  But anyway, I decided that 
layer was more hassle than it was worth, and experience with the new 
layout so far says I was right.

But that just lays the groundwork for the REAL upgrade.  I FINALLY got 
the video card upgrade that I'd been needing for awhile, thus bringing it 
more inline with the rest of the system.  It's a Radeon hd4650, rv730 
chip, gig video RAM (tho I have a feeling I'm not using anything near 
that), dual DVI output (I'm not sure if both are dual-link tho, might be 
one dual-link and one single-link), AGP bus as that's what my system is 
-- five years old, remember, I have PCI-X but not PCI-E.

Of course, the xorg native xf86-video-ati driver (and xf86-video-
radeonhd, tho that seems to be falling behind now, unless you have HDMI 
you want to support or something) only have 2D for anything r600 or newer 
in their released drivers, thru the 6.12 series (with 6.12.4 being the 
latest, and a possible 6.12.5 coming up).  There's not even a beta 
tarball out for the 6.13 series yet, so if one wants OpenGL support, 
really the whole point to the upgrade, one has to run the "live" driver, 
straight from git or available in the x11 overlay as the traditional live 
version 9999.

So that's what I grabbed.  I already had the latest non-live xorg 
components installed from the tree and x11 overlay, so I was fortunate 
and didn't need any further live packages, only xf86-video-ati-9999.

Meanwhile, I basically gave up on the kernel bug I was git-bisecting, as 
I couldn't duplicate it on the (then still unaccelerated) new radeon 
hardware, tho I saved a bisect-log in case it comes back with the new 
hardware after I enable acceleration, git-pulled, did a git-checkout of 
v2.6.32 (Linus git tree), did the usual oldconfig, then a menuconfig and 
changed my config around a bit, enabling KMS, etc.

Did a reboot into the new kernel and played around at the radeondrmfb 
enhanced CLI for awhile, tweaking a couple things there, then started X/
kde4 and started tweaking things for the new hardware, there.  

After editing xorg.conf and restarting X a few times, playing with 
glxgears, etc, I started trying out the newly available kde4 OpenGL eye 
candy options. =:^)  As I run dual 22" 1920x1200 LCDs, stacked for 
1920x2400, and the old card couldn't handle OpenGL at resolutions above 
2048 either direction, I hadn't had the OpenGL effects available to play 
with on the old card.  What a change the new card made! =:^)

So now I'm running kde 4.3.4 with OpenGL effects.  It's nice.  I've 
actually had the "snow on the desktop" effect turned on as I worked, for 
several hours now, tweaked a bit to add more "flakes" but reduce the size 
to make them a bit more realistic, and with the "behind windows" option 
turned off, so they float in front of the windows.  Much like watching 
real snow fall outside the window while you're nice and warm inside, it's 
quite a calming effect.

OTOH, there's still enough glitches to see why it's not released yet, and 
I did have one crash.  Also, font anti-aliasing /really/ looks bad now, 
it's /gotta/ be a bug somewhere I'm sure, so I turned off font anti-
aliasing entirely.  MUCH better!  With that, it's working well enough to 
be usable if a few visual glitches, mostly background repaints turning 
bits of the plasma panels and desktop weird colors at times, which goes 
away with desktop switches, etc, but also a semi-regular flashing of bits 
of one particular corner of the desktop, and artifacts appearing on 
scrollbars and the like occasionally.  But it's good enough I've no 
intention of going back, even if the driver code is unoptimized at 
present and the snow makes new launches rather less than responsive!  But 
I can always turn the snow bit off, if I want, and have a reasonably 
responsive system with the other effects still.

So now I suppose I'm experiencing kde4 as it was meant to be seen, fully 
accelerated opengl effects, cube desktop switching, snow on the desktop, 
wobbly windows (which unlike many, I think I'll keep tho I turned down 
the effect power a notch, and can turn it down another if I want), cover-
switch for alt-tabbing, etc.  Very nice, even with the glitches.  It'll 
be even nicer when the radeon r600 opengl driver and kernel KMS matures a 
bit.  Unfortunately, even in 4.3.4, kde4 itself is still buggy enough I'd 
consider it beta, tho late beta now.  The first kde 4.4 beta is out now, 
and since 4.3 still feels like beta anyway, I'll probably upgrade before 
the scheduled February release date, tho it'll probably be beta2 or rc1 
before I get to it.  I expect kde 4.4 to be what I'd call release 
candidate quality, the critical bugs gone and no show-stoppers, but still 
not quite there, and 4.5, in August, to finally hit what I'd call good 
release quality suitable for an ordinary user.  After that, it'll all be 
frosting on the cake, especially now that I have a decent video card and 
can enjoy it as it was designed to be enjoyed. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman