My upgraded Ubuntu 7.10 seems to be finally working, but it was not without problems, thanks to my ATI Radeon X700 card. We all know that the drivers for ATI are a pain, and here I am going to share my experience in case you run into trouble like me.

Firs of all: the proprietary ATI driver that Gutsy installs (linux-restricted-modules-2.6.22) does not work. My recomendation is that you follow this guide to compile and generate packages for the latest driver (8.40.4 as of this writing). Be sure you get read of any other driver you may have around, either installed by source or by Synaptic.

When you have finally installed your new driver, do not use the provided “Screens and Graphics” applet to configure it: either doesn’t work or I just could not understand it. Just make sure that your xorg.conf file has what it should and please reboot between editions of the file if for whatever reason you ran into the already mentioned applet. This program always rewrote the configuration file to use the vesa driver (failsafe option), and I never noticed under the last moment… You also have to reboot because some drivers might be loaded and could cause trouble if you just restart the X server. Of course you could use rmmod but then, you have to know details… reboot to be sure!

Now let me tell you more about my experience. After I managed to get the driver working, I got back my nice rock-steady 85 Hz, 1280 x 1024 desktop. Nice. I didn’t noticed anything new, but that’s because I hadn’t stumble with the System -> Preferences -> Appearance applet, and the last tab within, “Visual Effects”. I went for the whole enchilada and selected “Extra”…

Oh my… it just looks awesome!!!!

In fact, I never thought I could see Linux looking so fancy, with lots of transparency, wobbling windows, sliding workspaces and much more… It might be a little over the top for some people, but it really shows the potential of the new drivers and X development. Of course OSX fans should be saying that we’are just copycats. But then, who cares. We got it now and it is great.