Programmer’s Log Programmers Writing Stuff – Garry Bodsworth

How I Solved My Graphics Card Problem

A little while ago I posted about having problems getting my nVidia GeForce 6600GT AGP working on Ubuntu. I tried everything that a sane person would and then some. I tried Nouveau, Ubuntu's various versions in their repository, and the ones direct from nVidia. The closest I had to working was the beta 1.80 which kept crashing... When 1.80 was officially released I tried that and that did not work at all with a completely black screen (like the other official version I tried).

Anyway, my solution was to order from Play an ATi HD2600 Pro for £30. It's even got 512Meg on board which is a huge amount of memory. The main reason for this was an eye on the future for proper open-source support, that although is not currently comprehensive will improve in the future.

So I plugged the card in after cleaning out all remnants of all nVidia drivers, rebooted and it worked straight away. I enabled the closed-source ATi drivers and got all eye candy working as well. Ultimately I will use the RadeonHD driver that is open source in XOrg repositories, but it isn't quite complete. You can also keep track of available features in a handy table here.

Now I am happily able to use Ubuntu at 1920x1200 with useful 3D features like Expose and desktop expose.