The good news is that the recent ATI driver (for 4870 card) update seems to have fixed my Blender modelling issue – it is now possible to USE the program again. It is probably pretty silly (like 16-year old schoolgirl silly) but I was pretty chuffed to get responses from Ton Roosendaal on the Blender bug tracker report that I submitted on the issue. He is one of the founding members of the Blender institute and responsible for putting the open source movie projects together.
Bad news bears: Ubuntu Studio is stupid in that they don’t give you the source code for the kernal nor does it seem easy to find… well I haven’t found it yet! I managed to find ATI drivers for linux but can’t install them because of a political (that is right not a technical one) blockade in linux where it will not let me add proprietary code to the source code i.e. the ATI graphics card driver. Apparently I need to alter the actual source code to make it possible to do this. Although I can understand how this could maintain some quality control throughout the community it is a royal pain in the arse and seems a bit pigheaded. Like the GIMP having a not-in-my-backyard complex that prevented them from making a brush resize slider for about a decade.
So when I can be bothered (need is less now that Blender works in Vista with ATI) or start rendering I will go grab either vanilla Ubuntu or Fedora and use that. As far as I could tell the “low latency kernal” of Ubuntu studio in of use only with sound production which doesn’t apply to me – I’ve got Logic, Protools, Cubase and Audition.