My old Radeon 9500 pro worked o.k. in 11.0, but unfortunately I had a hardware failure and my system was out of commision during the period of time that it reached it’s end of life. I lost my installation so reinstalled with 11.1. As I had experienced in an earlier installation with 11.1 which is the last version of openSUSE that supports the 9.3 version of the Ati proprietary driver, for some reason 3d games do not work properly. There is a constant problem with the frames starting and stopping that I cannot correct.
I could just used the open source driver but it’s 3d performance lags so far behind the Ati driver that on my old machine its practically worthless except on the lightest games.
As a result I started looking for an alternative that would support my card and potentially found that with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron LTS. It doesn’t reach end of life until April next year and apparently shipped with Xorg 7.1
While I was making Inquiries on their forum it came to light that even at it’s end of life that the repositories are moved to another location for old releases and are still available for some time.
I don’t want to switch from openSUSE so I am curious to know whether there is any similar circumstance pertaining to older versions such as 11.0 that would give me access to the extra programs and updates that don’t come on the disk up until the point where it reached it’s end of life.
If not I may have to say goodbye, at least for some period of time.