Perry’s weblog

Got my new video card today. Finally. It works A-OK! Sapphire (ATI) Radeon 9800 PRO. I’m pretty happy with it.

Getting it going in Gentoo was pretty easy.

emerge -C nvidia-kernel
emerge -C nvidia-glx
opengl-update xfree
emerge ati-drivers
opengl-update ati
fglrxconfig

That will create an XF86Config-4 file for the card. I said “no” to using the internal AGP, opting to use the kernel’s instead. agpgart and the nvidia_agp interface were built as modules. In /etc/modules/autoload.d I load nvidia_agp and fglrx at boot time.

America’s Army is raising hell in Linux though. I’ll play SF_Hospital for about a minute and then the screen will become corrupt. Pretty nasty. But I can play it just fine in Windows.. I guess ATI’s Linux drivers really do suck.
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Windows 2000 & Windows NT 4 Source Code Leaked according to Neowin.net. That site is down at the moment, so I linked to the Slashdot discussion of it. Should be interesting…

So after I returned that card to Newegg, I ordered another one from gameve.com. What a nightmare. That place sucks. They sent me a used, old, defective card that they had advertised as new, and then I had to argue with the manager there to get him to refund my money. He kept wanting me to try another card from him, after the garbage that he sent me in the first place. It was a BGF GeForce FX 5900, and he blamed the problem on BFG. Said that they sent him the cards just like that. Sure, I believe that.

How many manufs keep new merchandis right next to defective, returned merchandise? How many would sent those defective cards out?

Now, if a store got a rush of orders for a certain card and took more orders than they had cards, what do you think they would do? Hmm… ship out some returned cards and pray that they work? Hmm…

I think gameve.com sucks. I’ll never do business with them again.

With this new computer, I’ve started playing America’s Army again. I had played it a little bit with the old computer, but it always kinda sucked. So I tried it out again.

I ran in to a strange issue where my cable modem would reset whenever I started the game, in both Windows and Linux. Did a little snooping around, and found out that it’s an issue that effects my cable modem – Com21 DoxPort 1100 I think it is. Seems to also effect the Motorola SB4200 and a certain Linksys router.

Since Com21 is out of business I couldn’t just download a new firmware like people with the Motorola unit can do. I dreaded having to visit the Comcast office. I had tons of troubles with Comcast when I first got service about 2.5 years ago, I figured it would be a nightmare visiting them again.

But I went anyways. And it was really quite painless. In and out in about 5 minutes. Came home, plugged it in, and I was good ta go!

Now to try America’s Army again…