weird. bought some more blank dvd's today and burnt ubuntu 11.10 beta and installed and ran absolutely fine.

maybe it just doesn't yet like usb installs ?

and yes, i'm tempted to try F16 now as well

EXCELLENT JASON!

What do you think of it then? Unity is very nice in 11.10 yeah? I was quite pleased to read that the bugs I had listed as being troublesome in beta 2 have indeed been addressed and will be fixed for the final release. Now that I know how to clone a partition easily, I'm definitely going to be installing the final and trying it out for a few days this time.

I've played around with unity before actually. It's not too shabby, but I think I probably need to give it more time to have a crack at it.

I was trying to watch a film tonight and also burn a few music cd's from my collection for a road trip tomorrow with a friend so I didn't really get much of a chance to play with it.

i need to get it installed and configured and see how we go from there.

Fedora 16 was a bust .. again

It's nice isn't it? I think this release will change a lot of people's perceptions of Unity. My only concern with it is the splitting of developer effort between Gnome shell and Unity. Wouldn't it have been better if they'd all just got along?

in case you're not aware, there is a new release of

http://distrowatch.com/ Clonezilla

Oooooohhhh 'citin .. ATI have released a new set of drivers .. and .. (stolen from the fedora forums ..)


You know what that means

You're trying it again, I'll get the popcorn...

Well it's only going to be two tries maximum tonight as i'm dog-arse tired

First try down - installed new drivers, rebooted and gnome 3 failed to load

set the resolution to 1440x900, reboot and it's still stuck in fallback mode - as per usual. Go to system info to flip the switch to try and turn off fallback mode but it reboots to .. fallback mode.

I did update the kernel and it rebooted to some horrible looking errors and ultimately did nothing so i'm going to do a quick reformat, re-install and just try it one more time tonight then i'm off to bed.

ok, 2nd try coming to a close.

rebooted and reformatted. when system was back, first thing i did was run software update. completed that and rebooted.

installed ATI drivers (as root), ran "aticonfig --initial" to set up the initial xorg.conf file. blacklisted radeon and radeonhd by adding them to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.

rebooted and .. fallback.

so i've just un-blacklisted radeon and radeonhd, and i've gone to system info and the 'graphics' tab to click the 'fallback' switch off and on to see if it will attempt to start gnome 3 on the next boot.

if it doesn't .. bed

actually if it does then probably bed as well

ok, well un-blacklisted radeon and radeonhd and rebooted and gnome3 still failed to load and dropped to fallback mode.

flicking the fallback switch on and off has no effect on anything so balls to it. off to bed.

nice these things work for everyone else and not me

i'll try opensuse at some point tomorrow with gnome 3 and the new drivers ..

I'm not being snarky, but if you'd been paid even minimum for all the hours you'd spent uninstalling, reinstalling, formatting, playing with video drivers, you'd have enough saved up to buy a top-of-the-line new PC that would run Fedora and Gnome 3 perfectly!

Fair point

But since my other "troubles" with my old motherboard, i've actually now got a decent PC. Athalon dual core processor, ati hd 4350 graphics card and a brand new motherboard.

sure, only have 2gb ram but i'll get some more of that somewhere down the line when the finances improve.

anyway, opensuse didn't work. did the same thing - installed, ran the software update. installed the latest drivers and used the one-click install method to add gnome 3.

rebooted and ..... fallback.

just tried fedora 16 with the same procedure again, but that one rebooted and the screen was totally corrupted graphically. tried rebooting again with nomodeset and nothing happened at all - just a black screen.

so, my absolutely last, last, last and final try is ubuntu. will follow the same procedure - install, update, install drivers, add gnome 3 and reboot.

not really expecting it to work TBH, but i don't have any plans to do a great deal today until around midday, so it's a time killer at least

That's interesting. I have an Intel Core 2 Quad with a HD4650 graphics card and never had any issues with it at all. I've used Ubuntu and Arch, and tried out Fedora from a live-USB, and none of them have given me any problems. I don't use the proprietary drivers, I just use the open-source ones.

Maybe waiting until the middle of October when Ubuntu 11.10 comes out (or using the beta now if you're brave, but it does still have issues) might be the way forward. It has Gnome 3 in the repositories. Either that, or Arch.

i can never force the correct resolution in the proprietary drivers no matter how i try - i've tried doing it with xrandr to no avail.

i'll check out arch though - wasn't aware of that. cheers

just about to add gnome3 to ubuntu so we'll see what happens - drivers installed and working, so i'll give gnome3 a chance to mess all that up .. heh

Pratting around is never wasted. I've picked up all my knowledge in the last 30 yrs that way.

The Ubuntu 11.10 beta runs extremely well on my ER1402 with single core AMD Neo processor, it even runs unity and the latest nvidia drivers work great too.

Be warned! Arch is great, when you get it working. But be prepared to invest a couple of hours. The basic install gets you a screen with a root prompt and a package manager. You need to set up networking, download and install Gnome, and so on. The installation guide is here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_Guide

It's incredibly well-documented, the Arch wiki is one of the best sources of general Linux documentation online these days, but it is not an easy graphical install process.

In its favour, you get the ultimate choice over everything on your system, you choose the graphics driver, you choose how it works. I use xf86-video-ati on mine, and it works fine. You also get the latest updates as and when, rather than every six months. I'm expecting Gnome 3.2 in the next few days.

If those creating the hundreds of distributions were giving they would instead spend their time improving the base rather than creating yet another GUI package.

I just like my software base to work and don't really give a fig about how smooth or 3 dimensional any GUI is.

Absolutely agree. I learnt Informix 4GL with the help of a blagged course manual and my own fannying around and managed to squeeze a 12 year IT career out of that one !


Balls to that then

11.10 Beta it is then, just to make a nice round number of 5 distros tried, 5 failed ... heh

(And yes, Gnome 3 did break Ubuntu 11.04 ...rebooted, screen went black and nothing happened ...)

ahh you have to smile

before trying 11.10 i had a random idea that i wanted to see with opensuse, in so much as installing it, updating, adding gnome 3 and then installing the GFX drivers.

so reformatted, re-installed and went to run the update and ..


and the whole thing failed

I'm not asking for help or a fix mind, just sharing my crappy luck .. haha !. Really off out now

hhmm..engaged brain briefly and ran zypper with the --no-cd flag to ignore the cd updates and the update ran through fine.

so will now try my idea of installing gnome3 then GFX drivers ..

so still not going out quite yet

Go on - get out in the sun & install some vitamin D in yerself!

You can get back to driver hell when it's snowing next week.

Installing Gnome 3.2 into Fedora 16 - quite slow at the minute - perhaps due to heavy demand on the servers

I doubt it'll make a difference.

Since you've experienced the resolution problem on different machines using different graphics cards and different distributions i think it's safe to say the problem is with your monitor. It's probably not communicating its supported display modes correctly, or else the drivers are not correctly determining them.

If you're connecting to it using HDMI try switching to DVI (and vice-versa) and see if that makes a difference. I have to use DVI because with HDMI i only get a blank screen.