I downloaded and installed PCLos .92 on a computer with a Pentium III 933, 512 MB of memory, and an ATI Radeon 7000 video card. The video, particularly text, looked somewhat fuzzy, so I also installed the MSfonts package and looked at stuff again, but even using the fonts I am used to in Open Office (instead of Word) and Firefox, things still do not look as good as they do in Windows.

So, I downloaded the PCLos ati8500up version and ran it live on a computer with an ATI 9000 card and a 17" CRT monitor. It looked about the same as when I then ran my previous general purpose PCLos download live and both looked about the same as my installed version.

But I could not really see that pictures (jpeg) looked inferior, which seemed very strange because I can clearly see a slight fuzzing of small loop areas (as in the upper part of "e") and sort of a ghosting effect in vertical lines as in "L" and "I", etc. in text.

So I set up the monitor with a KVM switch connected to a computer running windows and the one (described above) running the PCLos general purpose version and jumped back and forth between the same picture, having found various photo sites on the Web (again with the CRT monitor).

And altho I have to strain to see it, there is a slight deterioration in picture quality with the Linux setup also, altho it is nothing like as evident as the text problem which seems odd since the pictures I looked at had fine detail (I chose them for that reason for comparison purposes)

Someone suggested to me that a commercial distro such as Mandriva or Suse would contain drivers for ATI video cards that would presumably solve this problem. However, having looked at the supported hardware for both Mandriva Power Pack 2006 and Suse 10, I find that neither seems to list specific card support for anything but the most recent, high powered and expensive, video cards . . . presumably those brought out more recently for 3D gaming applications as ATI and Nvidia have fought to be number one in that area, altho one of the two manufacturers makes a general statement about Nvidia and ATI support.

So I think before I buy a boxed version of anything I need some additional input:

1. Is anyone else having this problem on older (more than 2 years at least) computers with Linux? Or is my situation unique for some obscure reason, or is it just the PCLos distro?

2. Is there any reason to think, since neither Mandriva nor SUSE list support for older video cards) that either would really work much better than what I am getting with PCLos (which is borderline unsatisfactory).

I find this strange because a local real estate outfit (Century 21) has a fellow that decided it was stupid to keep paying Microsoft license fees, so he set up their offices in this area to use Linux about a year ago and apparently they are/were satisfied (at least according the newspaper article about it). At the time, I managed to contact him and he said he used Gentoo, which I would not think would come with any special drivers. Of course for commercial applications one does not need sound, but one certainly needs decent video!

Thank you for any suggestions or input.

Bill

Incidentally, why did that check mark show up next to my post? Never been here before and I appear to be doing something wrong!

Thanks,

Bill