Alex Little

Monitor comparison - my new 22'' desktop vs the 7'' of my Asus EEE PC

Since coming back I seem to have been unexpectedly busy – I had assumed that I wouldn’t have much to do, but have lots to prepare ready for returning to Ethiopia in June and attending the eLearning Africa conference at the end of May – where I’m giving a presentation about the Digital Campus project.

I’ve managed to catch up with many friends so far, but it’s been a little different than I’d expected. My time is very flexible and free at the moment, but everyone else still has work and other commitments, especially during weekdays.

I spend a very frustrating Monday trying to get my new computer set up correctly. I bought a new desktop machine with an ATI Radeon HD 5450 Graphics Card which doesn’t seem to work well with Ubuntu (9.10). I had a hard time figuring what was causing the display to freeze up at apparently random times. After being in use for anything from 5 mins to 8 hours, the screen would freeze up, with only the mouse moving and the only way of getting out of it being to do a hard restart.

I had got the ATI drivers installed as it was the only way I could get the full resolution from my monitor (1920 X 1080). I’m quite sure I had everything installed correctly, despite being confused by all the advice and postings about installing these drivers.

In the end I read a post which mentioned trying out the next release of Ubuntu, Lucid Lynx (10.04) – even though it’s not officially released for a week or so, it apparently has better support for ATI graphics cards. After the installation of Lucid Lynx, I haven’t need to installed any proprietary drivers and the monitor is working well at it’s full resolution. There are a few other issues at the moment (such as not being able to install Adobe Flash plugin), but then it’s still an Alpha pre-release so these issues are to be expected and should be resolved when the full release comes out next week.