This week these two things caught my eyes. Actually, both are not latest news, but I noticed them just now.

1   ATI Driver for X Server 1.5 (X.Org 7.4)

Since Fedora 9 — if I recall correctly, started shipping with X Server 1.5RC5 — I started to use Mesa not ATI’s driver since Mesa works normally with Desktop Effects. Few days ago, I installed WINE again. My repos include livna and freshrpms. Yum also installed ATI Driver from freshrpms as dependency, but the driver failed to build at booting.

Later, I finally tried to find out what is going on, and realize Linux users do not have a working ATI driver for X Server 1.5 for months. Until two weeks ago,

Canonical Publishes ATI Catalyst 8.10 Beta. Note that you can not download it from official page1, which still support up to X.Org 7.3 only.

That driver doesn’t seem to work properly on Fedora 9, even with a patch, you can read this thread.

[1]http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/linux-radeon.html is gone.

2   Fedora’s X server would be moved to VT1?

This may happen on Fedora 10. I read this firstly on LWN.net. It sure started flame wars (X on tty1 in Rawhide/F10 and Reasons to preseve X on tty7). But I really don’t mind, when I use a Linux distribution. I don’t want to change default settings too much or too many. Distributions are usually heavily modified, even they provide some degrees of custom abilities. As long as I can live with default settings, I would stay.

This decision seems to be made already and 2008-10-28 is the day of Final Development freeze, you can see a task in BetterStartup:

If rhgb is in the kernel commandline, switch mode in initrd, use drmfb and then GDM on vt1

I don’t mind. Just give me a stable and fast Fedora.