Hi,
on an old laptop I needed some package (pdftk) from 11.3 and so I upgraded.
But I cannot get the graphics running at a reasonable speed now.
This old laptop has a Radeon RV350 (mobility Radeon 9600 M10) as shown by lspci.
The current ATI closed source drivers don’t support this card any more but the
legacy driver doesn’t support the 2.6.34.7-0.4-default kernel anymore.
Using the open source xf86-video-ati driver gives me an unacceptable alternative:
without a kernel boot parameter it’s dead slow, glxgears shows only 200 frames/sec
and my Opengl application (see below) is just unusable with this setting.
Adding the ‘nomodeset’ kernel parameter make the graphics much faster - glxgears reports 1800 frames/sec - BUT now my Opengl application freezes the machine
(only a power cycle can revive it)
I’m using the Python/OpenGL application “Impressive” to present pdf files.
Any help is very much appreciated,
Helmut.
RWTH-Aachen University
Germany
Helmut, I can only offer you a best guess answer here but since nobody else has come forward at least this might trigger something more definite from somebody else.
When you refer to “the legacy driver” I guess that you mean ATI’s proprietary Catalyst 9.3 driver.
When you boot using the nomodeset kernel parameter it sounds as if the opensource radeon driver is being loaded. You should be able to check this via the terminal command
lsmod
Since you have explained that ATI’s closed source drivers won’t work for you, the open source radeon driver should be the most appropriate driver for your card anyway. Again you can check this for yourself in the Supported Hardware section via
man radeon
Since the “impressive” application is unavailable for installation via the standard or Packman repositories I speculate that you probably downloaded it from Sourceforge.net, e.g.
Download Impressive for free at SourceForge.net or Impressive
When I Googled “Python/OpenGL application Impressive” I not only found your Phoronix forums post on this subject but more importantly [Bug 56619] NEW: Impressive is a program that displays presentation slides provided for the sake of eye candy | bugs@mandrivalinux.org archives](http://lists.mandriva.com/bugs/2009-12/msg02849.php) which linked to some apparently bad news https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=56619 suggesting that “impressive” is no longer being maintained and therefore incompatible with current software environments.
It looks as if you might have to put up with Evince(Gnome) or Okular(KDE) or Acrobat Reader (acroread) for reading pdf’s and “print to a file” or Open Office “export to pdf” functions for document creation (in other words use software from officially approved sources).
Does anyone else have any additions or corrections to this?
Terry.