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

[Mihai Călin Bazon]

What do you mean by "HW" accel?  I got suspend/resume working with the
latest fglrx driver (kernel 2.3.23.12) and it works flawlessly.  I
don't even know if it's using the native suspend or not (I just press
the keybinding).  3D is working fine (I suspect that's what you mean
by HW accel?).  AIGLX doesn't work but I don't mind; Compiz looks
good, but when I do serious work I find those effects distracting.

That's not to say I'm happy with it.  Hell I've spent countless hours
debugging the suspend/resume problems and every, every time they were
related to the infamous ATI driver.  It works now but who knows if it
will after the next upgrade? :-)  And we're in 2008.  It's almost 2
years since I got this laptop.  I'm not buying ATI again, never ever.

-M.

On Jan 23, 2008 5:11 AM, Harry Mangalam <harry.mangalam@uci.edu> wrote:
> 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]
> --
> The linux-thinkpad mailing list home page is at:
> http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-thinkpad
>



-- 
Mihai Bazon,
http://mihai.bazon.net/blog