[ltp] Shame and degradation: T60, ATI X1400, fglrx, Gutsy, apt-get dist-upgrade, fonts, HW accel, suspend/resume

[Harry Mangalam]

Take heart - the story ends in redemption.  My T60 running Gutsy 
(2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP) now has HW accel, suspend/resume, and is 
running Gutsy.

The trick was the latest ATI driver (version 8.45.4):
http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html
  It claims (correctly) that the suspend/resume no longer kills the 
display.  However a previous one in the Gutsy repos also works with 
suspend/resume - it just doesn't simultaneously give you hardware 
acceleration.

I tried Hardy and after several hours of trying various things, I got 
the latest fglrx to load and give me HW accel, but I could not get it 
to suspend/resume correctly - I think it's just too early in the 
release cycle. As well, there were some other software failures and I 
really did not want to rebuild my entire stack of software when I 
could apt-get dist-upgrade it at one shot.  

So I went ahead, put in my original disk and issued those commands.  I 
got to the graphical login screen, but at every login, the screen 
would blank and I'd be returned to the login screen.  There were 
various errors but I eventually whittled them away. They turned out 
not to be the problem.
If you want the whole rotten tale you can glean it from my ubuntu bug 
report, shamefacedly retracted after I figured it out:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/184992

The problem was that somewhere in the depths of my ~/.kde dir was 
something that buggered X.  Leaving out a several hours of 
increasingly dire kernel compilation catastrophes and 
incompatibilities that built on each other to almost 2 GB of source, 
object, lib, and includes, I found that if I created a new user and 
logged in as that user, X worked perfectly.  So, after deleting the 
disastrous kernel tree I had enough space to create a fake user and 
slowly copied files back until I had a working system again. I'm not 
sure what I buggered, but I don't care (as long as it doens't come 
back..)  All the good stuff is there and working.  I did have to 
manually download and build the s2ram package from 
http://suspend.sf.net as it seems to have disappeared from the Gutsy 
repos (tho it will soon be reappearing).  I'm usin gthe s2ram, not 
the built-in suspend/resume - that sufferes from the old suspend but 
buggered resume.  As I mentioned, the last fglrx from the ubuntu 
repos si work with the native suspend/resume, but I could not 
convince it to give me HW accel.  And since I was used to s2ram 
anyway, no biggie.

Surprisingly, sound, network (wired as well as the Intel 3945ABG), and 
all my SW goodies are intact (sound works much better).

If anyone wants my xorg.conf such as it is, just ask.

hjm

-- 
Harry Mangalam - Research Computing, NACS, E2148, Engineering Gateway, 
UC Irvine 92697  949 824 0084(o), 949 285 4487(c)
--
[A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves.
Edward R. Murrow]