i should be working (but i'm fixing my computer).

or not.

Though usually I do not expect linux version upgrades to backslide.  Occasionally I must remind myself of my own adage: "When all else fails, try another distro."

...

So my gateway netbook quit working (fan failure that suddenly came back alive???), reinstalled Vista clean, new version of OpenSUSE (11.3) and then for no particular reason Jolicloud.  But I hadn't gotten any of these OS installs really ready for daily use.  After a good deal of entertainment with Jolicloud, I decided to get my OpSu install working.

Oh, surprise!  Now, this LT3103u Gateway has  ATI Radeon video.  In OpSu 11.2, 3D did not work, but I had this outstanding 1920x[something] video.  It was like, Wow!  As far as I had gotten earlier, the most I knew was "not anymore."

Further use, and I discovered that the drivers were now intolerable.  There is a regular pattern: the mouse cursor turns into a rectangle, chunks of screen turn weird, text disappears.  Truly not usable.

Also, with an ironic similarity to my Nvidia based laptop -- I now discover that just as Nvidia suddenly abandoned drivers for that board, simply skipping its model number in future driver releases, ATI has done the same for this board.  I must have some magical selection process when I purchase computers.   Apparently I automatically buy the models that turn out to be a corporate mistake and are abandoned.

Further research reveals some tension between Novell, which has produced the "radeonhd" drivers and Canonical, which has worked with some ATI software engineers to produce the "radeon" drivers.  At least, this is the controversy as I could best figure it out with some hours of web research.  I could not retrieve the ATI linux drivers from the ATI website -- the javascript or whatever would not function.  Would it be a crazy irony that ATI's linux drivers can only be downloaded via Microsoft Internet Explorer?  Don't know the answer to that, but I finally retrieved the 10.7 version from Softpedia.

The drivers installed and everything, only to report that I do not have supported hardware.  However, sysinfo now reports that I am using radeon drivers.  Plus the other problem to deal with is that the xorg.conf system seems to have been changed, so a lot of the potential help articles don't.

In any event, and who could have guessed, KDE 4.4.4 DOESN'T WORK on this computer because the graphics are non-functional.  Anyway, I am leaning toward the Novell/Canonical driver war theory, if only because Jolicloud is working just fine and that is based on Ubuntu.  But, it's based on outdated Ubuntu ... sheesh, what will it take to get everything working on this computer?

So ... weird irony.  Now, one might think that the problem being the video driver, all is lost with respect to OpSu 11.3 and this computer.  But, apparently not so ... I switched to LXDE and seemingly, at least as of now, everything is working just fine via the LXDE desktop.  So, once again KDE plasma is torturing me, just as it has been doing through the multiple releases since 4.0.  And now, for the first time in all that time, KDE has apparently released its next version (4.5) but I do not have it on any computers.  I keep hoping against hope that I will end up with an actual stable install of KDE on some computer somewhere and leave it at that, but I guess it was not to be 4.4.4.

I discovered also, however, that the updated LXDE is a bit more refined than the earlier version.  And, that I got the new more refined version via the clean install, but not via the updated OpSu 11.3 install I put on my other netbook.  I sort of guessed something like that would happen -- clean installs always seem to work out better than update installs.