Captain Support: Not to the rescue…

This morning, the display on one of my computers was a bit odd. I rebooted the machine and when it came up I got no output on the monitor. I plugged my laptop into the monitor and that worked fine, so it looked like the graphics card had died. I popped down to a local PC store and had the choice of remortgaging my house for new graphics card, or buying a cheap and cheerful one. I did the latter. Even so, the new card was much flasher than the old one.

I put the card in the machine and it booted up and I had a display again. Trouble was, GNOME shell had failed to start and I was knocked back into fallback mode, that looks a bit like GNOME2. Sigh. Forgot to check the the card against support for the ever-so-picky GNOME shell.

I now have a choice to make:

• Ditch it and get a new graphics card… again…
• Switch to KDE or XFCE… shudder…
• Stay with the fallback option until Fedora 17, when allegedly GNOME shell will not be so bloody fussy.

I’m probably going to stick with the last option as I can’t be bothered to waste any more time on this. All of a sudden, Windows and Mac OS X don’t seem so bad after all…

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I don’t need a lecture on why GNOME shell is so picky. I know all the arguments. I’ve read all the crap. Doesn’t mean it’s not a pain in the ass when you buy a newer and more powerful graphics card and you end up with an inferior user experience.