The ati petition

[Timothy Murphy]

On Saturday 04 September 2004 19:10, Hamie wrote:

> >I read this with a certain degree of jaundice,
> >since the ATI driver in the current Xorg
> >does not work with my Sony Picturebook (C1VFK)
> >which has an ATI Rage Mobility P.M graphic system
> >whereas the XFree86 driver in FC-1 worked perfectly.
> >
> >I wish one of your any number of people
> >would just ensure that the present driver
> >works as well as the previous one.
>
> Isn't that entirely the point? Or do I simply express myself so badly
> no-one even suspected what I was trying to say.
>
> With the Open Source drivers, you can look & fix them yourselves... or
> even find someone who would fix them... Or simply log a bug in bugzilla
> about it, and get some feedback on whether it's being looked at etc.
>
> With the Closed Source ones, you're at ATI's mercy. If they don't think
> they're broken, or if they don't care of they're broken, you're out of
> luck. e.g. the fglrx drivers...

I'm not sure it is any worse to be at ATI's mercy than at Xorg's mercy.

It is true that I could look at the code,
but I've always found X frighteningly esoteric.
Is there a simple introduction anywhere?
[I've been known to compile programs from CVS,
and even dabble in C++;
but I always imagined X had more spheres inside spheres
than Dante's Hell.]

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland