About 4 months ago, my Dell Dimension E521 with Windows Vista encountered blue screen errors, and after that was corrected the computer’s Vista license file became corrupted locking me out of the system, forcing my family to buy a new computer. Now that we have the computer, and are getting the drive removed for use as an external hard drive, I wanted to resurrect the computer with a new hard drive and one of these distros: Ubuntu (as Linux Mint), Fedora, or openSUSE. As those are the distros that are deemed compatible with the ATI catalyst drivers. In the computer I have an ATI Radeon X1300 Pro graphics card, which requires the legacy version of Catalyst Control Center (CCC) v9.3. I was wondering if OpenSUSE v11.2 would be compatible with CCC v9.3 with little to no modification. Or if not, what open source community drivers are available for my particular model of Radeon graphics card. Thank you to those who will attempt to answer my question.
The X1300 runs well with the fglrx- / CCC-driver, I have set up this very card twice and it worked well. Is there a special reason why you ask for the 9.3-version of CCC? The current version is 10.2.
Also after reading into it a little bit, I also would like to know if either the RealTek ALC888 HD or Realtek AC’97 integrated sound devices work in 11.2. I am not sure which of the two that I have, although I would like to say that I have the ALC888 HD because my computer was equipped with a 7.1 channel capable integrated sound card. I am certain it is either of the two cards because I remember seeing RealTek audio device as an audio device under Vista.
Yes there is, it is the version recommended by ATI on their site. Although if 10.2 works well, I can’t say that it matters. Thanks for the help gropiuskalle!
Yes those sound devices will work.
I do not know how well the 7.1 surround sound works though, albeit if I had to bet, I would bet it also works well.
openSUSE-11.2 with the 2.6.31 kernel comes with 1.0.21 of alsa which is a signficantly improved audio driver over earlier alsa versions. If you install KDE instead of Gnome, you will find in KDE pulse audio disabled by default (and hence KDE has IMHO less sound problems than Gnome). wrt KDE, in order to save on maintenance costs with SLED, Novell/SuSE-GmbH decided to update openSUSE-11.2 to have the same KDE version as SLED, and thus there are official updates that will update openSUSE-11.2 KDE from 4.3.1 to 4.3.5. This “official” KDE update to 4.3.5 is an unprecedented move and while it means a massive update, it also means a better KDE for openSUSE-11.2.
Reference the graphics, here is a practical theory guide … in particular note post#1 and #11: openSUSE Graphic Card Practical Theory Guide for Users - openSUSE Forums
Thank you @oldcpu. This makes the decision between Ubuntu and openSUSE that much more difficult. I guess I will dual boot, Ubuntu for GNOME applications, and openSUSE (with KDE) for KDE applications. Thanks again to everyone who helped out on this thread.
You don’t have to - GNOME-applications work well under KDE and vice versa.