I am running openSUSE 11.1 on a Dell Laptop with an ATI Mobility Radeon X1250 video card. I have had a lot of trouble with this card with openSUSE, though Ubuntu plays with it pretty well. Out of the box openSUSE seems to use the Vesa driver, which gives less than optimal resolution (13xx by 7xx; don’t remember exactly).
I soon installed the ATI proprietary driver (fglrx). While I now get the correct resolution (1440x900), the performance is terrible. Window decorations disappear when moving windows, windows go blank when moving, pop-up windows are garbled. And with all that 3D performance was still crummy.
Since I wasn’t getting 3D anyways, and the driver obviously was not performing, I decided to switch to the OSS radeon driver. I then discovered that there are two radeon drivers, radeon and radeonhd. radeonhd sounded cooler, and according to this post; it supports my card, so I installed it and ran sax2 -r -m 0=radeonhd.
Sax2 would not start up; I tried the plain radeon driver, it still wouldn’t start. I then had the bright idea of uninstalling the fglrx driver. That killed my X server (as expected) but I still couldn’t get SaX to load either the radeon or radeonhd drivers.
So I reinstalled fglrx. Now my X server is back, and then I edited xorg.conf manually to use the radeonhd driver. Now I have a very strange situation. lspci -vv shows the fglrx_pci module loaded for my card, but the Catalyst control center says that the ATI driver is not installed or in use, and my xorg.conf lists radeonhd. In addition, if I uninstall fglrx, I lose my video.
What driver am I using?