in yet another annoying episode with redhat 8.0 and building my system, i discovered that, upon using a spanking new ati radeon 8500 dv video card in my little shuttle FS51G box, that the drivers included with my distribution did not support all the hardware acceleration functionality of the card. which is not redhat’s fault, since ati doesn’t completely share its technology (yet.)

so, i download ati’s proprietary accelerated drivers (upon installation of which, either ati’s script or, more probably, insmod(1), had the courtesy to tell me i was tainting my GPL’ed system with closed code,) and things are great in graphical land – except now my mouse wheel won’t scroll.

i must have tried every combination of driver to try to get it to work, to no avail. moving up to XFree86 4.3.0 says they support the radeon 8500, but that means straying from the distribution that redhat built and i update with ximian’s red carpet (overall a decent way to keep up to date, if not too sophisticated.) *sigh* someone told me using distribution’s code is the way to go – screw that.

i compiled XFree86 from source to find that the built-in radeon driver supports some more 3D code, but not the really fancy stuff, apparently – glxgears(1) runs way slow, maxing at 400 frames per second. but my wheel works! choices, choices. i can either have 3D or a working wheel it seems – ati’s accelerated driver does not work with XFree86 4.3.0.

BUT, since i have already compiled from source and ditched any chance of making this a stock distribution box, i compiled 4.2.0 (the version of X i already had that redhat had for me,) and lo and behold, everything works.

use the source, luke, screw trusting other people to know what’s good for you.

this time, it appears that the latest version of bash, 2.05b, that ships with redhat 8.0, does not support (or i can’t get it to support,) the directory-style completions that i am used to. eg, if i am in my home directory and want to run src/mijit/bin/program.sh, i should be able to:

cd
./sr[TAB]

and have it complete the phrase with “src/” – complete with forward slash and not advance to the next word, so i can auto-complete down through directories. this does not work in bash 2.05b but it works in 2.05a. this appears to actually be a “bug fix” since it is listed in 2.05b’s CHANGES document. i like the old behavior better. i should come up with a solution for them before bugging them.

well, no, i just bugged them anyway, saying i failed to see how this was a bug fix. i like the old behavior – give it back! give me an option to keep it!