Catalyst 10.9 fixes black rectangle/black artifact bug

This is actually not a how to but i thought it's worth to mention in my blog =). The new AMD/ATI Catalyst driver fixes the black rectangle/black artifact bug (which most happened when using Firefox or Thunderbird). This bug was because of a new 2D Acceleration method which was introduced with Catalyst 10.6 . But you could avoid it by telling catalyst it should still use (slower) XAA. Now this work around is no longer needed.

Connection problems with Linux Mint 9 and Zyxel NWD-210N

After changing the hard drive of a friends PC i had to reinstall his Linux Mint. I didn't thought it would be a problem but i was wrong. As the installation was finished i wanted to update his system.  But his Internet connection somehow didn't work even though i was connected to his wireless network.

Because i knew that the network and the wireless stick worked correctly, it had to be a driver problem. With Linux Mint i was in the comfortable situation that NDIS-Wrapper was already installed. First try with the driver from the CD didn't work but i didn't gave up and downloaded a new version from the Zyxel homepage. Still the same problem.

I searched the web again and found a kernel module called ar9170 which seems to wok with the Atheros 802.11n USB chipset which is inside the Zyxel NWD 210N. I unloaded NDIS-Wrapper and loaded the ar9170 module:
sudo modprobe -rf ndiswrapper
sudo modprobe ar9170

Then restarted the machine and voilà it worked.