I've been using Fedora Linux for the greater part of this year, starting with F18 and upgrading via Fedup to F19. For most of that time, I've used the closed-source AMD Catalyst driver as packaged by RPM Fusion instead of the open Radeon driver that ships by default with Fedora and most every other Linux distribution.

I'm not proud of it. But the differences in performance are too big to ignore.

Things that stink with both drivers: Neither the open- nor the closed-source driver will resume my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop after suspend. (The machine uses the AMD A4-4300M APU with AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics.)

Things that stink with the open driver: Only the Catalyst driver delivers working 3D acceleration, meaning without it I can't run GNOME 3 at all, most games look like hell, and a certain wonkiness crops up here and there on various web pages.

With Catalyst, my glxgears frames per second are 100 times greater than with the open driver. I don't know what glxgears fps numbers really mean, but 5,200 has got to be better than 50.

Things that stink with the closed driver: In Xfce, many application windows have lost the borders on the left and right sides. I can't explain it.

I also cannot successfuly use UEFI secure boot with the Catalyst-enabled kernel, though I can do so without Catalyst installed. It's not Secure Boot itself that is stopping the boot. It just hangs at some point -- after some IP tables lines in the dmesg, I think. The solution is keeping EFI but turning off Secure Boot.

You'd think the solution would be easy and ubiquitous. Here's what I wanted to do: My personal blog run with the Perl-based Ode system. Ode doesn't use a database. Instead it stores its entries as text files in "normal" directories on the server.

I wanted to have exact copies of everything in my Ode documents directory on my local computer and the server. And I wanted the freedom to add to or modify anything in this directory on either side (server or laptop) and have everything track on both machines.

Many of us use Dropbox (or Box, or SpiderOak, or Google Drive, or ...) to both back up some or all of our files and mirror them on other desktops and laptops we happen to use.

But what if you want to keep a filesystem in sync across any number of servers and desktops and laptops without using a third-party service?

My first thought was, "I'll just use Dropbox. Certainly there must be a way to use Dropbox on my server/VPS/shared-hosting. Nope. No. It doesn't work that way.

My second thought was, "Holy shit, Dropbox is missing out on a whole lot of revenue and screwing its users besides."

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