Catalyst beta drivers update

Hell yeah!  AMD's 13.2 beta 6 drivers work.  Finally!

Finally some answers...

I've been, on occasion, scouring the net for answers on my AMD hardware on Ubuntu.  Support has been incredibly awful but I wasn't surprised.

lspci describes my hardware as: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Thames XT/GL [Radeon HD 7600M Series]

This provided me with an interesting article that seems to explain a possible solution to this problem.  Essentially, it looks like you need to install the latest beta driver from AMD to get things pseudo working.  Specifically, the post mentions that the 13.2 Beta 3 version works on the laptop.  Ubuntu distributes the 12.6 Catalyst which is virtually unusable here.

One has to wonder when Ubuntu plans to put the aforementioned driver in the repository.

Update:
An additional article that discusses this on Ubuntu.

Here is the launchpad link for Ubuntu's fglrx stuff.

VIM tip

Coding using vim?  Once the syntax highlighting goes bonkers, type in... :e

Ubuntu 12.10 and FGLRX

Regarding the AMD crap driver on Ubuntu, this write up seems like a good one to keep handy on this blog.  I am going to wait for some dkms deb packages to arrive because there's no way I'm doing those custom driver installs now.  Still, the article is a good resource to have.

HP Pavilion G4-2123TX and the Realtek Card Reader Update

So, I saw a kernel update come in today from Ubuntu and I noticed that the rts5229 module wasn't being loaded.  I checked the driver being used and its: rtsx_pci.  I uninstalled the rts5229-dkms deb package and tried my SD card reader and Ubuntu loads it up without issues.  So I'm lead to believe that the new kernel update includes the drivers for these.  Good job, Canonical.

My current kernel is linux-image-3.5.0-24-generic.

Some thoughts...

Next time you install graphics drivers, check with the manufacturer's website before grabbing the driver directly from nVIDIA or AMD.

Saints Row The Third is insane!

Updating Vista...

Vista has been utterly slow and it's taking days to update it.  This just references the issue I had with installing SP1.  It first won't show up in the Windows Update but apparently it's a matter of installing all the updates it needs.  When it did show up on Windows Update, it kept trying to install and it wasn't happening.  This article helped out.  I downloaded SP1 and SP2 from the article and am going through installing them via safe mode (F8 on startup).