ATI released a new driver today, read the announcement here. The interesting part is that they introduce a new daemon called “atieventsd” which will make sure in future that everything works right. At the moment the daemon is in charge for hot plugging of Digital Flat Panels and for Thermal Event Power Management. As usual Phoronix as a very detailed review and looks, again, on some new and hidden features.
Although ATI was not the first choice for years on Linux desktops the last attempts of ATI in this area are really interesting and show that the y now take it serious… – in summer we will see the official announcement of the dynamic display switching tool according to Phoronix. I wonder if we will get this together with some new features.
In completly unrelated news, and also a bit older, the choice for the future audio support of flash for linux has fallen: ALSA. Yes, finally. And I really, really like that. Ok, with one half-sad eye because the *BSD people will not be able to use flash in an easy way because they are still stuck to OSS. But to be very honest: if it’s broken, fix it – that is the reason why Linux will drop OSS eventually, and that is the reason why there is ALSA. I doubt that the ALSA people would not like to port ALSA parts to *BSD, or to help writing a *BSD sound system which has a ALSA compatible API. In any case, do not complain about missing OSS support when this really hurts almost all Linux users – OSS is a pain in the ass as soon as there is another app which just probably could use the hardware also somewhen .
Now we just have to wait until we get the new flash. So much to wait for… 😉
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