I'm mining on my main desktop, which is running Ubuntu 12.04 and cgminer. Right now, I have a fair amount of input lag on the machine.

Is it possible to get a desktop running totally smooth while mining?

I've followed some other information on the forum to put together a script that starts cgminer at boot in xubuntu.

So far I've got my script running from rc.local starting cgminer in a detached screen after 120 second delay. When i run rc.local manually everything works perfect, but when i reboot i get,

Code:

 [2013-04-03 12:58:42] Started cgminer 2.11.2
No protocol specified
No protocol specified
 [2013-04-03 12:58:42] Error -1: Getting Device IDs (num)
 [2013-04-03 12:58:42] clDevicesNum returned error, no GPUs usable
All devices disabled, cannot mine!

Is it trying to load cgminer before the GPU drivers load? I feel like i'm so close but just can't get over this hump. Any ideas what's happening here?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Is there any preference for operating systems? Is there any benefits of certain ones?

I'm trying to get a headless ubuntu system going with my Radeon 5850 but the catalyst drivers are just not cooperating. I guess I'm mostly wondering if the days of struggling with catalyst and ubuntu is worth it.