I have a desktop machine which I use purely for Linux, the specifications are Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz, 5GIG Ram, 80Gig Hard Drive, 19″ Widescreen TFT and nVidia 7600GT Graphics card. The on-board network has failed and it has an Intel gigbit server card installed (which Windows 7 will not recognise) and a PCI 54G Wireless Card. I had tested Fedora 13 on VMWare and liked the look of it – I set about wiping the present Ubuntu 10.10 and wanted to use Fedora instead on this machine – this is were it started to go wrong..

Fedora 13

Fedora is based from RedHat and much like every distro out there, you can choose the Gnome Look, KDE or various others. Of course one is going to look much like the next if they all run on Gnome for example, what is important here is how easy it is to install software, drivers and generally keep the system running.

I liked the look of the icons so off I went and wiped my current (working) Ubuntu 10.10 install and got this thing running. I do like using Compiz, not so much for the flashy bits but more for the multiple screens, quick switching of applications and finding out what is running at the time. This is were I got stuck to be honest, it told me my current graphics card does not support 3D – Wait, What!!

Using a different Driver

Fedora uses nouveau driver, this is free and not written by nVidia and it looks like it does not think my 7600GT is capable of 3D. After spending time on google, typing many items into Terminal and failing – I start to wonder why I wiped my machine in the first place. I looked around and found that Linux Mint has in fact a new version – currently Version 10 and out in Release Candidate stage.

Linux Mint 10 RC

Not long after Ubuntu finally got to 10.10, Linux Mint which is based off Ubuntu (which itself is based off Debian) gets there new version ready. The best way to describe Mint is you take a mix of Gnome and KDE, add in the various codecs that Ubuntu cannot distribute and you have Mint.

3D Comes as Standard

Once installed, there was an icon informing me there is a driver I can install, supplied by nVidia and once this is selected and installed – we have Compiz in all the glory. What I did like about adding stuff here is you press what looks like the ‘start’ button and type and if it is a package that is not installed, you can do it right there.

Use what works for you

Many people who use Linux say “Ubuntu is bad, use Slackware” or “Fedora is better then Ubuntu” – what I say in fact is your better of using what you know and if your more comfortable type ‘apt-get’ instead of ‘yum’ then go with that. This was the case of Mint vs. Fedora, I coul dhave took the time and got 3D Working in Fedora but I felt it easier and better for me to just install a distro I know how to get working..

Every once in a while it is good to make sure you have the latest software running and today was a good point in question in that there is a few programs that have been updated and worth posting about in case anybody missed them. If you are already way ahead of the game – then no worries, nothing lost here but the one’s that I have seen so far are WordPress Updating to V3 and ATI getting to 10.6 on the Drivers fron as well as NVidia if your sporting a GeForce Card.

WordPress 3.0

Normally I throw caution to the wind and press Update but this time I went into my FTP and grabbed the entire site as well as download the MySQL Databases. The update went without a hitch and the nice new light look along with telling me all the things that needed updating at once was nice. If you run WordPress then on your site, I Suggest you upgrade as soon as.

ATI Catalyst™ 10.6 Suite

Released on the 16th June (two days ago) it introduces some new feature and many fixes:

New in Version 257.21

• Adds support for Blu-ray 3D with NVIDIA 3D Vision technology. Learn more about the hardware and software requirements here .
• Increases performance for GeForce GTX 400 Series GPUs in several PC games. The following are examples of some of the most significant improvements measured with GeForce GTX 480. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration:

• • Up to 14% in Aliens vs. Predator (1920×1200 noAA/AF – Tessellation on)
  • Up to 4% in Batman: Arkham Asylum (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF PhysX=High)
  • Up to 5% in BattleForge (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF – Very High settings)
  • Up to 5% in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
  • Up to 4% in Crysis: Warhead (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF – Enthusiast setting)
  • Up to 24% in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (1920×1200 no AA/AF)
  • Up to 9% in Far Cry 2 (2560×1600 8xAA/16xAF)
  • Up to 25% in Just Cause 2 (2560×1600 no AA/AF – Concrete Jungle)
  • Up to 7% in Metro 2033 (1920×1200 no AA/16xAF – Tessellation on)
  • Up to 40% in Metro 2033 with SLI ((1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF – Tessellation on)
  • Up to 8% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (1920×1200 no AA/AF – Day)
  • Up to 110% in Stone Giant with SLI (2650×1600 – Tessellation on, DoF on)
  • Up to 6% in The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena (2560×1600 no AA/AF)
  • Up to 9% in Unigine: Tropics (2560×1600 no AA/AF – OpenGL)
  • Up to 5% in 3DMark Vantage (Performance and Extreme Presets)
  • Up to 19% with Transparency AA (1920×1200 4xTrSS – measured in Crysis)

• Upgrades PhysX System Software to version 9.10.0223.
• Adds support for OpenGL 4.0 for GeForce GTX 400 Series GPUs.
• Adds support for CUDA Toolkit 3.1 which includes significant performance increases for double precision math operations. See CUDA Zone for more details.
• Adds support for new extreme Antialiasing modes for 3-way SLI PCs, including up to SLI48x AA for GeForce 200 series GPUs and up to SLI96x AA for GeForce GTX 400 series GPUs.
• Adds support for a new ‘Quality’ mode for NVIDIA’s Ambient Occlusion control panel feature.
• Adds a new NVIDIA Control Panel setup page for SLI and PhysX for ultimate control over multi-gpu configurations.
• Adds a new NVIDIA Control Panel feature for ultimate control over CUDA GPUs, allowing the user to effectively choose which GPU will power each CUDA application.
• 3D Vision customers can download the v257.21 3D Vision drivers here.
• Includes numerous bug fixes. Refer to the release notes on the documentation tab for information about the key bug fixes in this release.

I dug out yet another Old Laptop – this time A Dell Latitude C840. The Tech specs I shall post in one second but for this exercise, I choose to download Ubuntu 10.04 Beta One (been new and all) and went to work installing Ubuntu plus working with Compiz to give me a radical 3D Desktop – this was not to be as you shall soon find out..

The tech specs

Running a Mobile Pentium 4 at 1.8GHz, it has 1GIG Ram, 40GIG IDE Hard drive and a nVidia GeForce4 440 Go graphics chip which runs the screen at 1400×1050. The battery has since died and this only runs off the main power supply but it still is more then capable when running Windows.

Install

Ubuntu 10.04 installed just fine and I was soon up and running but it warned me that the HD is about to fail as it has so many read errors. I enabled compiz and rebooted the machine as instructed – this was the last time I saw anything on the screen as such.

The problem with the Graphics

I almost gave up to be honest at this stage but I went on a *working* windows machine and I soon found out that the nVidia GeForce4 440 Go graphics chip has an issue in Linux – shock and horror !! The problem it seems is that it enables the VGA Connector as the default device instead of the screen actually built into the machine.

I had a few options but I took the one which basically edited the xorg.conf file and added a line to use the default device of DFP (Digital Flat Panel). Once I rebooted I had the desktop up and running once again.

No 3D Graphics?

I went through and enabled all the normal settings such as Cube and so forth but NONE worked, so here we have actually two issues – the Windows Key (use in many settings for 3D) does not even get picked up and also the driver and/or the card is incapable of actually doing 3D Graphics.

Conclusion

I do expect that a *new* device not work as it should on Linux but I expect people to solve the problems of older hardware due to it been out for a long time and I am sure I am not the only person ever to own a nVidia GeForce4 440 Go graphics chip. This is why time and time again – I keep saying that Windows (even though it costs money) beats this Linux hands down time and time again for the desktop – I shall be installing Windows 7 on this machine later.

The Acer Revo R600 is what is termed a NetTop PC, this been very small form factor, cheap and low wattage desktop computer. I Spotted this on sale at ebuyer via a mail shot for £149.99. What do you get for the money? Is it a good media centre PC? Can it play games? Read on to find out more.

Specs

Intel Atom 230 1.6GHz

NVIDIA® ION™ chipset

1 x 1GB DDR2 800 SDRAM

160GB Serial ATA II

nVidia ION Graphics

High Definition audio (7.1) Audio

Wireless & Wired connections

Interfaces

• 6 x USB 2.0 ports
• Four-in-one card reader
• High definition headphone and microphone jacks
• DC-in jack
• Ethernet port
• D-Sub VGA port
• HDMI port
• eSATA port

Dimensions : 180 x 180 x30 mm

Verdict

The Intel Atom 230 CPU running at 1.6Ghz is about right for this small a desktop and while netbook struggle to cope with HD, when paired with the nVidia ION Graphics, it can handle HD in 720 and with a few tweaks to the settings, can even handle HD 1080P. Game is not realyl on the cards, maybe at a low resolution and settings but this is not what this machine is aimed at. If you wanted something small and cheap which can run 24/7 without burning to much electricity and no noise – such as running a web server, then this is also for you.  

Some games now run better with updated driver from Nvidia – the latest version just hit the shelf’s – 191.07.  Nvidia has released new WHQL-certified drivers for GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, and 200-series desktop GPUs and Ion desktop GPUs. As always with new drivers – there is the hope that it increases the speed of games you already own.

What’s Changed?

·  Adds support for OpenGL 3.2 for GeForce 8, 9, 100, and 200-series GPUs and ION GPUs.

·  Accelerates performance in several gaming applications. The following are examples of improvements measured with version 191.07 drivers vs. version 190.62 drivers (results will vary depending on your GPU, system configuration, and game settings):

• Up to 12% performance increase in ARMA 2
• Up to 8% performance increase in Batman: Arkham Asylum with GPU PhysX enabled
• Up to 50% performance increase in Call of Juarez: Blood in Bound with SLI enabled
• Up to 14% performance increase in Fallout 3 (indoor scenes) with antialiasing enabled
• Up to 10% performance increase in Far Cry 2 (DX9 version) with antialiasing enabled
• Up to 34% performance increase in Prototype with antialiasing enabled

·  Adds SLI support for Aion, Darkfall, Dawn of Magic 2: Time of Shadows, Dreamkiller, Fuel, Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, Need for Speed: Shift and more.

·  Includes numerous bug fixes, including the following key fix (additional bug fixes can be found in the release notes on the documentation tab): For graphics cards supporting multiple clock states, 3D clocks correctly return to 2D clocks after exiting a 3D application.

Grab the new drivers right here.