I know I’ve written about this before but video cards and linux are annoying. Actually, I think video cards are just annoying, this doesn’t have much to do with linux at all. They are confusing and hard to get working right.

I actually have two video cards floating around here, an NVidia GeForce (uh, let me check the box) 8400GS and an AMD Radeon HD2400Pro (had to check that box too.) I think they are both reasonable cards to have.

I haven’t been using either of them though, instead using the Intel GMA3100 on-board video. Why? Because the two previous times I tried to get the video cards working they didn’t. The only problem with using the Intel video is that it isn’t really up-to-snuff: the compiz (pretty window and graphics effects) slows down when you have too many windows open. I didn’t really mind that, but the problem is that when I reboot the system I have to unplug the monitor and wait until Ubuntu boots into a 1920×1200 mode before it will work. Otherwise the monitor gets into some strange mode and the video card picks up the EDID information from the monitor wrong, sending a bad video mode and basically not working.

Since I don’t reboot my machine often that isn’t a problem. Except when I have to reboot. Also, I just found out that some games – or in fact random bad key combinations – might also set the monitor into a bad state. And I can’t find out where Ubuntu stores the resolution information so I can’t ssh in and change it back to what it is supposed to be.

Since I had to reboot to get the screen back, I thought I would pull the desktop out and try shoving the cards back into it. Maybe the drivers had advanced in the past few months. The Nvidia card was still no good: graphic corruption and hard freezes after a short while. I think there could be some hardware incompatibility there. Also, the card doesn’t quite fit in my machine. So I couldn’t really use it anyway.

The Radeon card is working though! Well, kind of. It turns out that there is some problem with compiz and AMD’s driver so you can’t run them both at the same time. After turning compiz off though, no more video flickering, and it plays back video really well. I don’t know if it is an improvement over the Intel video, but at least it plays with the monitor well and doesn’t get stuck in strange non-displayable states.

I would love to use compiz, so hopefully AMD will get around to making their drivers play nice with it.