[ltp] T60p + FireGL + Atheros Wireless Hardy Upgraded Failure

[Phil Shotton]

Sounds like you've had bad luck there - my upgrade on exactly the same 
hardware went like a charm.
I suspect most of the problems are due to the proprietary ATI driver. If 
you can live with slow 3D performance (850 fps on glxgears) then I 
highly recommend the latest ati/radeon drivers from xorg.  This will 
give you fully working twinhead support and suspend-to-ram but won't 
allow compiz.
The ati/radeon drivers distributed with Hardy seem to work OK but I 
couldn't get suspend-to-ram to work, and there were artifacts around the 
cursor. The latest drivers from git cured that - thanks to Alex Deucher.

Good luck!
Phil

Bill Moseley wrote:
> I need to do a fresh install of Hardy.  Anyone done this lately with
> this machine?
>
> What I need pointers with is mostly how to best setup the wireless
> and video.  I assume I'll just fetch the ATI driver from the ATI site.
>
>
> I'm not set on staying with Ubuntu.  I started using it after using
> Debian for many years to get more current packages.  So, I'm open to
> suggestions.  Maybe Gentoo?
>
> Any reason not to use xfs instead of ext3?  IIRC, xfs doesn't require
> fsck to run (fsck always seems to run when I need the laptop to start
> *fast*, of course).
>
>
>
> I had a mostly working T60p with Gutsy.
>
> Network manager worked fine with wireless (although there were some
> access points I could not get but those with Windows or Mac could),
> XGL and Compiz worked perfectly (but could not run dual monitors with
> XGL enabled).
>
> Sleep and Hibernate didn't work due to the ATI driver problem with the
> newer kernel (SLUB allocator, IIRC).
>
> So, I've seen reports that some have working sleep with Hardy so I
> attempted the upgrade to Hardy 8.04 LTS.  I made sure Gutsy was
> up-to-date and ran fsck before starting.  fsck showed no problems.
>
> The upgrade failed miserably.
>
> The only package not to install was tzdata.  Didn't seem critical.  So
> rebooted.  fsck ran and reported many bad blocks.  Very odd that I get
> that right after running the upgrade.
>
> When it does boot I get:
>
> - I get a warning that can only run in low resolution mode.
> - Can't log in without disabling xserver-xgl.
> - xterm was removed.
> - wireless is gone.
> - None of the panel icons can be run.  Clicking on them just shows the
> "move" icon.  Very odd.
>
> And probably other problems.
>
> So, seems pretty hosed.
>
>