…all the things I can’t do anything about.
I have an ATI Technologies Inc Radeon IGP 330M/340M/350M graphics card in my Compaq NC4000 laptop, which I dearly love. It has more ram than standard, (760Mb, but shares 32 with the video card), a 1.6Ghz processor, and a 60Gb hdd option. The laptop runs Gutsy Kubuntu (7.10) like a dream.
Except.
The 2.6.22 kernel has issues with this card, and not just in Ubuntu, according to responses in the Ubuntu forum about it. Sure, the ATI driver in Xorg works, but fglrx doesn’t. No Compiz whizzbang desktop effects, no brilliant rendering of Neverwinter Nights *sob*. (Actually, the game plays, it’s just like wading through treacle).
Installing fglrx drivers leave X broken, no screen, flickering, it is a mess. Restoring back to ATI is fine, but glxgears still runs appallingly slow. Grinding gears!!!
Looking around, I found Unofficial Linux/ATI resource, (imho) it is the best resource for this card.
I did follow suggestions on the site, no *major* success. BUT. I have increased the speed of glxgears. (1766 frames in 5.0 seconds = 353.155 FPS compared to 565 frames in 6.5 seconds = 87.177 FPS). It looks much smoother.
And here is how.
The suggestions for restoring after a failed attempt to install fglrx included the information that the install overwrites the libgl1-mesa package. So, I decided to reinstall libgl1-mesa. Hmm,that package/library doesn’t exist.
A quick sudo apt-cache search libgl1-mesa produced a nice list, and from it, I (re)installed libgl1-mesa-glx:
sudo apt-get install –reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx
A suggestion from another post to a forum somewhere, (I lost track, lets be honest, I had twelve tabs of info going at once), led me to also add to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf, down the very end:
Section “Extensions”
Option “Composite” “Disable”
EndSection
Section “ServerFlags”
Option “AIGLX” “off”
Now it seems to be a matter of waiting for a new kernel and some joy!!!
UPDATE:
From this article:
“For ATI Linux customers, last month was certainly a very exciting time from AMD announcing open specifications (and the subsequent delivery of the first batch and the creation of the RadeonHD driver) to the release of the fglrx 8.41 display driver. The AMD 8.41.7 driver was the first driver to be based upon AMD’s new code-base and had not only delivered R600 support for the Radeon HD 2900XT, but clear performance improvements across the board from the R300 to the R500. However, this 8.41.7 driver was not well received by all. AMD had intended this driver to be targeted solely for the R600 customers, but many with older GPUs had immediately upgraded with some then having a foul experience.
Today it’s now time where the fglrx driver reaches yet another milestone. Not only does today’s release address many of the outstanding bugs for the earlier GPU generations while also introducing a few new features, but it also delivers AIGLX support! Yes, you read that right. You can finally run your ATI graphics card with the fglrx driver and run Compiz, Beryl, or Compiz Fusion without using XGL! This is coming 13 months after NVIDIA had introduced its AIGLX support, but now just days after the release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon it’s here for ATI hardware. “
