[ltp] Jaunty on Thinkpad R51

[Richard Neill]

Lucas Bxxx wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm using Ubuntu Jaunty on my Thinkpad R51. Everything worked out of
> the box, but the 2D graphics performance seems to be really slow.
> Resizing, scrolling and other graphics operations are really slow.
> Does anyone have the same problem? The originally installed Windows XP
> seemed much faster in this respect, so I guess it is a driver problem.
> I'm attaching my lsmod output so you can see what drivers are used on
> my system. To me it looks like all necessary drivers are loaded.

I think that all the ATI graphics cards are cursed. You might try the 
R51 page on ThinkWiki to see if there is a better solution (eg fglrx?), 
but here is what I do:

1. In xorg.conf, I select the generic VESA driver.

Section "Device"
         Identifier      "ATI Technologies, Inc. ATI Default Card"
         Driver          "vesa"          #Works, but slow
EndSection


2. Restart gdm  (or, simpler, just reboot).


3. At this point, you'll have no accelerated graphics whatsoever (all 
the work is done by the CPU), but it *will*  be stable, correct, and 
give adequate performance.


4. Note that this solution has a few problems:

   - lots of vertical scrolling (many pages) becomes a bit slow.
     Solution: jump rather than scroll - use "space" in firefox, or
     pgup/pgdn, or drag the scrollbar rather than using the mousewheel.

   - No 3D at all. Shame about the pretty screensavers, but otherwise,
     I personally don't miss it. Of course, if you care about Compiz
     or Google Earth, or Games, you may mind.

   - Video out to projector doesn't work for me.
     This may be an unrelated issue.


Best wishes,

Richard