I'm not surprised about the failure of Canonical/Ubuntu's million "give us , we promise to give you a phone packed with unproven, yet-to-be-seen technology sometime next year" campaign.

And it's not success wrapped in failure. It's just failure.

First of all, is a lot of money.

Second, Canonical is a company that has done a lot -- Ubuntu has certainly (and sometimes even successfully) gone its own way in the Linux desktop, server and cloud spaces. Live CDs, more drivers, a dependable release cycle for a Debian-based distribution, a huge and helpful community. Those are all great. But that seems so ... 2010. For Canonical anyway.

Canonical has promised a whole lot and delivered almost none of it:

• Ubuntu TV (I don't think anybody ever wanted it ...)
• That dockable Ubuntu-running Android phone from a couple years or so ago (seems eerily like Ubuntu Edge)
• Ubuntu Touch preloaded on a phone or tablet (they're promising this "early next year")
• Meaningful numbers of preloaded Ubuntu desktops (despite the claim by SABDFL Mark Shuttleworth of high percentages of Ubuntu-running PCs, you can barely find them in the real world)
• The multicore Ubuntu ARM server (Remember that thing at the last [or nearly last] "real" UDS? It wasn't a Ubuntu-made product, but they did feature it, and I don't see it)

All we do have is Unity -- a desktop environment optimized for touch and tablet with few to no devices to show for it unless you can geek out and install it yourself.

Unity is a big achievement. I don't blame Canonical for jumping off of GNOME. I knew they'd go their own way when they couldn't control the upstream.

But this Ubuntu Edge thing was over the top. Asking tens of thousands to part with today for a phone next year that promises cutting-"Edge" hardware unproven by any manufacturer -- and all this from a company that has NEVER SHIPPED A SINGLE HARDWARE PRODUCT?

(Unless I'm missing something, Canonical has never shipped hardware of any kind.)

No. No. No!

Canonical can fix this. Here's what they should do today:

• Find an existing phone -- a Nexus something-or-other -- that they can get in quantity
• Pound Ubuntu Touch into this device so everything runs as it should. Order up these devices by the thousands, flashed with Ubuntu Touch and ready for market
• Repeat for the tablet form factor
• And then sell the damn things

Once again if I'm not being clear:

• Develop for -- and sell -- the hardware that's available today. Just do it. Do it. Stop asking for multi-millions in advance and START FOCUSING ON DEVICES YOU CAN SHIP TODAY

Just ship. Everything else is noise.

Possibly (and in all likelihood probably) because of an error in the RPM Fusion package, when the 13.8 beta of the AMD Catalyst video driver for Linux replaced version 13.6 beta on my Fedora 19 system, it pretty much broke video and led me to remove kmod-catalyst and its associates and go back to the open Radeon driver.

X was dying when I ran most apps. That's bad.

So I waited for an updated Catalyst driver from RPM Fusion, and one finally arrived.

I installed the new 13.8 beta via the RPM Fusion package, and while video does work again, suspend/resume does not. This all worked on my AMD Radeon HD 7420g video chip in the 13.6 beta.

At least I have 3D acceleration back. Here's hoping for the return of working suspend/resume in the next Catalyst-for-Linux release from AMD. Better than that would be working 3D and suspend/resume from the free-software driver that ships with Fedora (and every damn other version of Linux).

But a working proprietary driver is better than nothing, so I'll take it.

So I finally get working 3D acceleration and suspend/resume and get rid of artifacts in Fedora 19 on my HP Pavilion g6 laptop (AMD A4-4300M APU with AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics) with the 13.6 beta version of the AMD Catalyst driver for Linux.

Except that the 13.8 beta driver was released about a week ago, and it finally came into my system via RPM Fusion.

And it broke X. Login is fine, but most applications -- including Firefox -- cause X to quit and send me back to the login prompt.

Not good at all.

I had to rip out kmod-catalyst and all associated packages and return to the open-source Radeon driver, which works great -- except for the aforementioned artifacts, lack of working 3D acceleration and refusal to resume after suspend.

No dependency hell here. RPM and the Yum package manager (which I'm using via the Yumex graphical front end) have performed admirably. But it's pretty hard to revert to 13.6 due to all the other related packages that have been upgraded to 13.8.

I haven't filed a bug on the driver just yet, and the consensus seems to be that AMD developers generally ignore such efforts. There is an "unofficial" Bugzilla instance, and Phoronix readers are discussing 13.8 as well.

So now I wait for the next build of the Catalyst driver to see if my system will like it.

Given that releases seem to happen about every two months, I pegged July 28-31, 2013, as the time when AMD would release a new Catalyst video driver for Linux.

On Aug. 1, 2013, AMD did release a new driver, version 13.8.

The most notable changes, from my perspective anyway, are support for the 3.10 Linux kernel.

So that's why there have been no kmod-catalyst updates from RPM Fusion for Fedora. Hopefully we will see one soon (and if it happens in the next few days, my faith in humanity, Fedora and RPM Fusion will be restored).

Keep an eye on this RPM Fusion page for a new kmod-catalyst driver.

Other than fixes of bugs I don't understand, and besides support for the 3.10 kernel, the most notable change is the removal of the "Testing use only" watermark from the lower right corner of the screen. Annoying, that watermark is.

Here's looking forward to a stable release of the AMD Catalyst driver that supports my newish AMD A4-4300M APU with AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics.

Is my problem with Catalyst or other? I am having one issue with suspend-resume, which only works at all, by the way, with the Catalyst driver: Everything seems fine when I resume, except that the system doesn't think I have an optical drive any more. The output of cd-drive in the terminal shows no drives available. When I reboot, the drive returns to the ranks of living peripherals.

This is the problem I'm having, except it's in Fedora, not Slackware:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/no-dev-sr0-dvd-cdrom-detected-after-resume-from-suspension-4175452609/

Basically, I have no problem with the optical drive during normal operation. But once I suspend and then resume, it's gone.

Here is the output of cd-drive:

[steven@shr ~]$ cd-drive
cd-drive version 0.90 x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu
Copyright (c) 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2012 R. Bernstein
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
No loaded CD-ROM device accessible.
Drivers available...
  GNU/Linux ioctl and MMC driver     
  cdrdao (TOC) disk image driver     
  bin/cuesheet disk image driver     
  Nero NRG disk image driver

If anybody has any ideas on how to "resurrect" the DVD drive after a resume, I'm ready to try 'em.

I could be imagining this, but from what I can tell with my very scientific method, aka "feeling around the CPU fan," my laptop appears to be running much cooler under Fedora 19 than it did with F18.

For those keeping score, this is Fedora 19 with Xfce on an HP Pavilion g6-2210us with the AMD A4-4300M APU.

In an equally unscientific assessment, the hard drive seems no cooler than in F18.

But a cooler CPU/APU? I'll take it.

I'm now running Fedora 19, but this happened when I was still running Fedora 18 with UEFI on my HP Pavilion g6-2210us.

The Fedora installation created an entry in the laptop's EFI boot menu for Fedora 18. But when I disconnected the hard drive, replaced it with another for some testing, then reconnected the original drive, Fedora was no longer in the EFI menu.

I was still able to boot Fedora by navigating to it via the "boot from EFI file" function in the UEFI menu, so I knew where the bodies (i.e. Fedora's EFI partition) were buried.

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(Click the image for a full-size look at my admittedly vanilla Fedora 19 Xfce desktop)

Update: A preliminary test revealed that my fedup problems were networking-related. I'll try again with my home network tonight.

Further update: My home network was amenable to fedup. It wasn't pretty; the fedup process needs work. But it did work, and not only do I have a working Fedora 19 installation, I now have the AMD Catalyst 13.6 beta video driver via RPM Fusion, and my 3D acceleration problems with my new AMD APU have been solved.

Even further update: With the AMD Catalyst 13.6 beta video driver from RPM Fusion, I'm lacking the small lines on either side of my application windows, but I do have 3D acceleration, and -- more importantly -- for the first time in Linux on this laptop, I now have working suspend/resume, which you'll have to pry from my cold, dead hands.

A still further update: This bug report appears to address the lack of those small lines on the sides of windows.

Here I begin.

After a shaky start with Fedora's fedup update tool to bring my Fedora 18 with Xfce system to Fedora 19, I did manage to successfully upgrade my HP Pavilion g6-2210us (with AMD A4-4300M APU, which features AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics).

After a curl error on my work network, I started the process on my much slower home network, quickly bypassed the error and started on the slow process of downloading 1,800+ packages.

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Given that my still-shiny, still-new HP Pavilion G6-2210-us laptop with an AMD A4-4300M APU that features AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics is not well-supported in Linux's current open-source Radeon driver, I've been looking to AMD's proprietary Catalyst video driver for help.

I've tried the current version -- 13.4. X won't even start.

That's because my APU is so new, even the Catalyst driver doesn't support it.

But help is on the way. Version 13.6 of Catalyst does support the Radeon HD 7420G, according to the release notes.

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This doesn't happen all the time. But it did today.

I'm stuck using Citrix. Maybe Citrix isn't crap (though it's certainly looking like it), but the application I'm using over Citrix is -- I repeat, IS -- crap.

I'm in Fedora 18, and it starts dying on me.

So I reboot into Windows 8. "Maybe it'll work better in the desktop operating system that isn't the playground of hackers and libre-everything partisans."

I start up Windows 8. I start my Citrix app.

It won't run at all in Windows. It won't even run badly. Nothing. Fucking nothing.

Back to Fedora. I just have to start a new session periodically to keep the Citrix over-the-wire goodness flowing.

Maybe this is a Windows 8 issue (because it runs reliably yet crappy in Windows 7). Maybe it's a Firefox-in-Windows issue.

All I know is I can hobble along in Linux but not Windows.