For as far as I could remember, I always had trouble in Ubuntu regarding my laptop's graphics card.  You see, when I bought my laptop I wasn't even thinking about such stuff.  In fact, I was quite happy with the notion that I could run Linux on this thing.  That is, until I saw an officemate of mine use his Ubuntu-installed laptop for his presentations.  My laptop couldn't do dual-monitors.  Yes, folks.  I was one of the many who had an ATI graphics card.

A little bit of research led me to ATI's linux drivers.  Somewhere along the way I had finally installed the thing and got my dual monitor feature working. Oh happy days!  That was until yet another officemate showed me how cool Compiz worked on his laptop.  Alas!  There was nothing more to do.  The Compiz eye-candy just wouldn't work with my ATI graphics card.  Then my hard drive crashed.  A few weeks later I got back my laptop and gave it a fresh MS Windows XP install.  I never used Ubuntu for more than a year since then.

A couple of months back, I was hearing all these new features on Ubuntu Hardy Heron.  It got me curious again.  At the same time I was having virus trouble with my Windows installation.  I needed to work, but I couldn't do a fresh install on my machine just yet.  I looked around and found information on how to install and run Linux on my external hard drive.  An hour later I was running Ubuntu on my laptop once again!

I've got a lot of stories to tell about my comeback. But the best of it all was the ATI graphics card.  Ubuntu 8.04.1 immediately recognized the card and asked if I wanted to use the proprietary drivers instead.  Oooh! Nice! I didn't have to go through all the trouble of installing them!  With that, I said yes and Ubuntu gave a second surprise. I had Compiz features! Oh joy! :D

Now all I need now is to get back my dual-screen feature.  I looked through my old bookmarks and found that I just needed to install fglrx-control from the repositories.  So I did, and... it didn't work.  For some reason the terminal kept saying that the command didn't exist. I was wondering if I had done something wrong.  After a few more minutes I finally find my answer.  Apparently they had changed the name of the command to amdcccle.

That was it!  I'm finally back in business with Ubuntu! :D