I have tried just about every thing I can find to get this to work on my laptop but have had no luck.
Laptop Pro Star 8088
Graphics card RV 250 ATI (128MB)
Memory 1GB (its all that it will hold)
Now this is the weird thing I can boot a Live CD of openSUSE 11 Gnome and make the Desktop Effects work no problem, but installing ATI drivers and unstalling ATI drivers still will not let the Desktop Effects work. I have tried all that I know and here are the xorg confs from both.
This one is what was installed but still didn’t work.
What is an RV 250 ? I think it means a Radeon 9000 or 9000PRO. There is no ATI proprietary driver support for that card. Best I have read it is considered legacy by ATI and NOT supported, hence you need to try to get this working with radeon or radeonhd graphic drivers. Note messing around with the ATI proprietary driver can break the functionality of the radeon or radeonhd if one does not clean up properly after a failed proprietary ATI driver install attempt.
You may need to custom tune your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file for such legacy OLD hardware, and that could be difficult. I managed to do so with my wife’s old PC (recently given away to our maid) but it was not easy. Thread here The ‘nomodeset’ comments I wrote may not apply to openSUSE-11.2
The problem with old hardware such as this is the developers do not want to spend any time on it. That was the answer I got to the bug reports I raised on difficulty configuring my wife’s old Raden 9200 graphic card.
Now, I’m not sure if the radeon driver version used in 11.2 provides 3D support. (It does in later versions like that used with 11.3). Your xorg.conf shows that you’re using the radeon driver. If you want to keep using 11.2 and the radeon driver, you may want to try adding this repo for updated Xorg drivers.
Be aware its not necessarily straightforward for new users.
A more simple alternative is just to upgrade to openSUSE 11.3 (or wait until 11.4 is released) and use 3D capable radeon drivers for old hardware like yours. (Thats what I currently enjoy with my X300 chipset).
My recollection on this is for such old legacy hardware, one can only use the proprietary fglrx (Catalyst-9.3 to be exact) driver on openSUSE11.1 or earlier. One needs a version of xorg no newer than 7.4. The version on openSUSE-11.2 is too new, and hence the Catalyst 9.3 (fglrx) will not install on 11.2.
Nor will any newer catalyst version (fglrx driver) after Catalyst-9.3 install on a PC with the Radeon RV250.
Hence if one wishes to use the fglrx driver on such old hardware, one is looking at openSUSE-11.1 where support stopped 3 days ago.
Thus the radeon or radeonhd is the only approach.
I hope I have that correct (ie xorg-7.4 is only on openSUSE-11.1 and hence one needs openSUSE-11.1 or older to work with Catalyst-9.3)
Yes this is a Radeon 9000 card and yes the laptop is old like me but runs great for only having 1GB RAM but it does have a P4 in it, and it is a dual boot computer with yes WinXP but it has served me well for a every long time. The real thing I don’t understand is in openSUSE 11 and 11.1 the desktop effects work with no problems. I had openSUSE 11.1 installed and thought I needed to update/upgrade to at least 11.2 before they stop supporting 11.1. Well I will either have to do a lot of research or go back to openSUSE 11.1. I don’t know how much of a problem it would be going back to 11.1 and getting updates but its some thing I might have to try. I have tried putting 11.3 on here but it’s just to new for this computer.
I will take a look at the info you have linked and try to work this out.
Well looking at what you just said about the xorg files made me think so at look at those I have xorgX11 7.4-35.3 installed and I tried the ati-driver-installer-9-11-x86.x86_64 file with no success.
I appreciate that assessment. I have a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo 7400M laptop (with different graphic hardware from your PC) that has served me well for years, but openSUSE-11.1 with its 2.6.27 kernel is the last openSUSE version that will run on this laptop properly with the community’s better graphic driver. It affects all distributions and not just openSUSE. So I am remaining on 11.1 for now on that laptop.
My guess is with 11.1 you had the Catalyst 9.3 graphic driver which worked well with 11.1. But either xorg 7.4, or kernel 2.6.30 were the last xorg/kernel that would allow the ATI proprietary Catalyst 9.3 driver to function. ATI declared many graphic cards legacy at that point, and from then on, the ATI proprietary graphic driver will not work with new xorg nor with newer kernels on old graphic hardware. OpenSUSE-11.2 has the 2.6.31 kernel and hence openSUSE-11.2 will NOT work with any proprietary ATI Catalyst driver with ATI ‘legacy hardware’ (which includes your PC’s Radeon 9200). [It will work with newer hardware]. That means Linux users who wish to still use that older ‘legacy’ graphic hardware must use either the radeon or radeonhd open-source drivers for best performance (as vesa and fbdev are simply too slow).
There has been a lot of work going on to improve the Radeon open-source driver. And when it comes to implementing the code for fixes to the radeon open source driver, openSUSE is not as ‘cutting edge’ as the latest Fedora nor the latest Ubuntu. Hence those two distributions will provide superior radeon graphic driver performance at the present time, while we in openSUSE wait for them to submit their ‘custom’ fixes upstream, have the fixes accepted ‘upstream’, and then wait for the fixes to make their way back ‘downstream’ for the openSUSE distribution to take advantage of.
In the mean time, if you are adventurous, there are some things you could try.
You could try updating your openSUSE-11.3 graphic driver and mesa from the factory-tested repository, as that may provide better performance in the radeon driver.
Or you could simply go back to 11.1 like myself, and hope projects like the “EVERGREEN” project (currently planned to be trialed with openSUSE-11.1) provide some measure of additional life to openSUSE-11.1.
As oldcpu has stated you’re stuck with with the radeon driver. However, you mentioned
… but installing ATI drivers and unstalling ATI drivers still will not let the Desktop Effects work. I have tried all that I know and here are the xorg confs from both.
What can happen is that removing the proprietary driver doesn’t restore the X-server to original completely. If you still have 11.2 installed, you could try the advice in this thread. Alternatively, reinstall openSUSE 11.2 and see if you can enable the desktop effects as desired.
BTW, have you tried openSUSE 11.3? Why do you not think it will work well with your hardware?
If one has decided that they do not wish to use 11.1 because it is no longer supported, then when it comes to the radeon driver, openSUSE-11.3’s radeon driver implementation is in the most part superior to that of openSUSE-11.2’s implementation. Still, it is not yet as good as what we see in Ubuntu and Fedora (with their custom patches that have not made it upstream yet) and hence that was why I suggested one could try factory-tested if one really wants the special desktop effects.
Or alternatively, try a custom edit to the 50-device.conf file (in 11.3) or the xorg.conf file (in 11.2) similar to the lines which I had working on my wife’s old PC (with a Radeon 9200 PRO).
Reference installing rpms from the ‘factory-tested’ in order to get a more cutting edge open source graphic driver that might function better, I need to come up with a guide as to how to do that. At the moment my knowledge is lacking a bit here, and I need to go through some older posts to remind myself exactly what rpms need to be updated (as I have since forgotten). Or perhaps one of our users who knows more could do the same.
Of course factory-tested is still ‘factory’, and will not have gone through the testing that a normal openSUSE delivered open source graphic driver will have undergone, so there are risks such an update could make things worse. Plus just because there is a newer version of an rpm in factory-tested, it does not mean the contents of that rpm update the graphic driver for one’s hardware. … Perhaps that suggests something else a volutneer on our forum could do, which is keep track as to what driver versions are in the latest factory-tested, and then post that information so others can see what is available.
Well here are my test results from testing live CDs.
Ubuntu 8.04 9.04 10.10 Failed when changing the desktop background.
Fedora 12 Failed when changing the desktop background.
openSUSE 11.3 Failed when changing the desktop background.
The only one that has worked so far is Ubuntu 8.10 Kernel 2.6.27-7 Gnome 2.24.1
I have not installed any drivers this is just straight off the live CD. All the ones that have failed made the screen unreadable to where I had to use the power button to turn off the laptop. I did notice one thing with Ubuntu 8.10 when I clicked on the desktop effects Extra a window poped up saying searching for drivers.
I guess now I have to decide which one to install openSUSE 11.1 or Ubuntu 8.10 mmmmmmmmmmmm I think openSUSE 11.1 thats if I want the desktop effects on this laptop. I just love the layout and how polished openSUSE is.
Well oldcpu you are not going to believe this one. I saw a Linux version on DistroWatch that got my eye and the name of it is Zorin OS. Yes it’s Ubuntu based but the weird thing is that on that old laptop that I have, it runs great on it. I don’t know as of right now what they have done to the video drivers but it works unlike Ubuntu 10.10. I have not installed any ATI drivers just a plain install with Gnome desktop well their version of Gnome. I’m going to keep testing it out and try to find out what they have done to make it work with old video cards.
If Zorin is Ubuntu based, then I would not be surprised. I do believe the best patch available to date (which may not completely address the problem) still may be the one noted in post#158 of this bug report which is the fix-i855-cache-coherency-v9.patch (note still at version #9).
There was a custom Ubuntu community liveCD (ie NOT official) created by a Ubuntu user for testing this patch, which is referenced here: Live-CD of Ubuntu 10.04 with updated Intel-drivers and 855gm-patched kernel-modules « Glasens Blog … and there is a torrent here: http://glasen-hardt.de/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/ubuntu-10.04-855gm-desktop-i386.iso_.torrent which can be downloaded and used then to download the Ubuntu test distro liveCD. I’ve been seeding that Ubuntu CD for some time (with a seed ratio > 5 ) , and I am NOT a Ubuntu fan. But I think all distro’s need to work together to solve this 855GM problem. If you do download that and test on it, please be certain to post your results on the bug report 27187 thread advising that you tested the Ubuntu cd with the fix-i855-cache-coherency-v9.patch. Note the mainline/official Ubuntu liveCDs do not have that patch applied and hence they will IMHO most likely have the same freeze you experienced.
Its possible Zorin distro has applied that patch.
And also, there have been many attempts to fix the 855GM problem of which ‘some’ attempts have worked for some 855GM implementations, but not all. And some of the ‘fixes’ will work for varying amounts of time. … say from 15 minutes to 6 hours … with a crash anywhere in between. So in those cases one really has to be using the 855GM graphics for an extended period to be assured of seeing the crash. … Of course in my 855GM case the crash typically happens fairly quick.
So its possibe if you operate this Zorin for an extended time, the crash will appear.
I do have a laptop with a Intel video card and I will try this out just to see if it works, because Linux is Linux no matter what flavor you use.
When I said Zorin works I was taking about my other laptop that has a ATI RV250 card the one I had to put openSUSE 11.1 back on. I have tried a lot of different versions of Linux and none will give me any eye candy (compiz) not that I really need it but it’s nice to have some to show off to people when you have your computer running.
The torrent link that you posted does not work but I did go on to the blog site and started the download so I can test it out on my small laptop that has the Intel video card, and help the Linux community out because if this fix works then that means it could help a lot of people.
Ahhh thats too bad the torrent is no longer available. … I guess there is no point then in my continuing to seed the iso file. My link is not the main link.
Well I tried the Ubuntu 10.04.1 version on my laptop with a Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME Graphics card and it worked for about an hour, two things that I noticed one when I tried to run the Test System it froze had to reset by power button. I then installed flash then went to youtube and played a video first time all went well but it would not go full screen by the button on the page but if you click the popup button and then made it full screen it worked. Then when I tried to replay the video it froze about 1/3 the way through it. I guess there still needs to be some work done.
Oh and the videos you have posted are the same thing that happens to my other laptop the one that has the ATI RV250 in it with the new kernel, but with that said it does not happen with Zorin Core 4. I have been playing with that one all day today and only had freeze one time. The Light version has the onpenbox desktop and the Core has Gnome. The Core works well with my ATI RV250 and the Light version works like **** with my i855GM. The menu bar keeps blinking. On the I885GM I do have openSUSE 11.2 and Ubuntu 9.10 and both run very well on it. Ubuntu’s kernel is 2.6.33-22 and openSUSE kernel is 2.6.31.14-0.4.
