I had a dream, that i can keep my old AMD64 a little longer with minor upgrades. My latest upgrade included 2GB of extra memory and a brand new ATI HD 3850 (AGP 8x).
This graphics card was really my only choice, since the AGP extension slot has been replaced by the PCI Express. I felt that my 100 euros was a fair amount of money for a replacement card for my nvidia 7800GS.
My new card shipped with tons of new features, including HDMI etc. I was really happy and excited about it.
I installed the card, and the drivers to Windows first. Everything worked ok. Superb. Then it was linux turn.
Recently i installed an ubuntu 8.04, which is rather ok distribution. When the boot process finished, linux informed me that a new graphics card was found (exceeded my expectations), and requested guidance to install the new driver.
Ubuntu found that it was an ATI card, and offered to me to install 3rd party drivers. I checked OK, then i restarted the system. Then … black screen of death (by the way there is a workaround if you google it).
OK, i said, time to see that OpenSUSE 11.0 with KDE 4.0. I installed it but i was not very happy, since KDE 4.0 needs lots of work. In addition, the SUSE driver i installed from the OpenSUSE repositories did not load properly.
Then it came to me, i will switch to my good old debian. Install by hand the ATI drivers, and get done with it.
I installed debian (Stable), along with the latest drivers i could find. They worked perfectly. I am happy, with one slight problem. I LOST THE MOUSE CURSOR. There was activity of the mouse, but no cursor.
Ok, i googled it a little, and found that some ATI cards have a problem with hardware mouse cursor, so the solutions is to just add to my xorg.conf the ‘Option “SWCursor”‘ command.
Did it, but then i noticed that the performance of the X server’s was really sloppy. I actually saw the refresh of each window in slow motion when i moved them around 
.
And here i am writing this post, wasting my time on X11 configuration files. Someone once told me, “never do another person’s problem, your own”. I just did.
