The root of my problems has a name, and it’s called ATI. When I bought the video card it never crossed my mind that I would switch over to Linux and it turned out that the ATI support to linux is very, very poor. I mean, the card works like it should, I have 3D acceleration, Compiz works great, even some linux-made games like Warzone 2100 look beautifully, but when I try to run Guild Wars or Sim City 4 through Wine it fails miserably because there are some calls that the ATI driver failed to implement and there is no work around.

The other main problem I have is with MythTV. I am able to set it up, I can record programs, change channels (that one was a pain in the ass to make it work), browse the guide, but thats just it. I can not watch live TV or view the recordings trough MythTV because there is an audio buffer problem that fucks the video making it flicker. The only way I can watch TV is through gzine, mplayer or vlc, but I can deal with that.

The rest works beautifully, I can access the network shared folders of other computer without problems, and they can access mine. I know that in Windows World no one has to ever bother configuring that, but in Linux World you had to configure Samba to get that, not anymore because Ubuntu does it for you, like it should be.

As a Web Developer there is something I can not live without. Dreamweaver. Some people would say that “real” programmers use notepad, and I have this for those people. Go fuck your mother. If you want to waste time coding everything manually thats fine, I don’t. Nothing, absolutely no software on Linux is able to give me the same amount of freedom and tools I get from Dreamweaver, and thats a shame. But as you can see in the picture below I can still use Dreamweaver with a little help from VirtualBox.

Ubuntu, and Linux in general has its problems but the root of those problems is the poor or sometimes lack of support from hardware vendors and since this computer was not made with Linux in mind it will keep failing, a lot. That is why I’ve been considering to exchange computers with Kaiser, Ill be loosing because this one is much more powerful than his computer, but his computer is more Linux Friendly. Maybe next month I will try that because I will have lots of spare time to burn since I will be unemployed and with nothing else to do.