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I’d been thinking of upgrading the system graphics card to better cope with dual monitors, there was just to much lag and a few other little annoyances with the existing ASUS EAH3450 card – it would probably be ok running just one monitor, but  running 2 seemed to be stretching it’s capabilities.

So, after the debarcle with upgrading the system memory, or rather not upgrading it, I ended up with a credit note at my local PC shop. Rather than just leave the credit note just sitting there doing nothing, I decided to cash it in with an additional $90 and grabbed a new Sapphire HD5770 card.

Well the card is great, but unfortunately the new ATI drivers didn’t get along with Hardy 8.04 LTS – the ATI Catalyst Control Center simply wouldn’t open, and as such I couldn’t make any adjustments, nor set the dual monitors to run as one big desktop. After several days of frustration trying to get it sorted, including using the new drivers with an older version of Catalyst Control Center, I finally resorted to installing Karmic 9.10 on another drive.

Well that fixed the problem; 9.10 supports the new drivers as well as Catalyst Control Center, and I’ve been able to adjust settings and set up both monitors to run as one big desktop. The down side was having to migrate all my system settings and applications across, that’s taken a few days, and no doubt I’ve forgotten the odd application.

I wasn’t intending changing to a later version of Ubuntu until 10.04 Lucid Lynx LTS, so I’ll see how Karmic goes for a few months, if it’s ok, then I may just stick with it rather than migrating to 10.04 when it’s released.