Juha Nieminen wrote:
> I am running Suse 10.2.
>
> I have an ATI Radeon X800 and thus I cannot use ATI's own linux driver
> for this reason: http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=499
>
> (Yes, I have tried it. The X800 card runs hot like a grill with ATI's
> driver.)
>
> For this reason I'm using the 'radeon' device driver. Problem is: No
> 3D acceleration, so OpenGL programs can only run in software mode.
> However, that's not the major problem. The huge problem is that after
> running an OpenGL program a few times (usually two) the system hangs
> completely. (And I really mean completely: It becomes absolutely
> unresponsive. No keyboard lights, doesn't respond to any outside attempt
> at contact. It's completely hung.) The only solution is a hard reset.
>
> I can live without hardware-accelerated OpenGL (although I'm not happy
> with that, of course). However, any program being able to completely
> crash my system by simply opening some OpenGL windows is not a good
> thing. This is a major problem.
>
> Any suggestions?

Don't use an ATI card. Get an Nvidia card. For best price/perf
I recommend a 7600GT. An 8600GT is too slow... anything better
that's contemporary costs too much (don't need DirectX 10 in Linux).

You can get a 7600GT for about $50 USD slightly used. Even less
if you get a 7600GS (but it's not as fast).

A 7600GT is enough to handle the most torturous 3D games available
in Linux today (UT2004, Doom 3, Quake 4, even Half Life 2+ if
you know how to make that work).

There may come a day when we'll all switch to ATI (once the FOSS
driver is working). But that looks to be at least a year or
more away. With the Nvidia, there are some working drivers from
Nvidia (proprietary), you may have to compile the kernel module (not hard).
I recommend version 100.14.19.


There are lots of problems with ATI even in Windows...

If you don't need games, then even the lower end Nvidia cards
are fine. Might even find somebody throwing away an old one.