nVidia vs. ATI graphics card for fedora

[Jack Howarth]

Kevin,
   Our experience here with x86_64 Fedora 10 linux and
the radeon drivers on a couple machines with Radeon X1650 Pro
cards has been very uneven. One of the boxes is very fragile
to spontaneous reboots when running the free drivers and
using UCSF Chimera to work with MD trajectories. The other
box still has a habit of blanking the screen for minutes
at time despite having the nomodeset flag passed to the
kernel. I am afraid things will only get worse under Fedora 11.
So far, testing on a MacBook Pro with X1600 graphics, I find
that pymol still renders outside of its windows. While I
appreciate the aims of these changes to X11 and the free
drivers, the problem is that Fedora has become destablized.
It is really exposing the limitations of a monolithic kernel
when the graphics drivers keep taking down the entire box.
                        Jack
ps We run a large amount of OpenGL software (free and 
commercial) and have found the non-free drivers to be
more compatible in general. Hopefully this will improve
over time.