I will not buy ATI any more

It was painful to install the fglrx driver on opensuse 11.1 and i still dont know if i installed it right. I still have issues.

I dont recomend to any linux user to buy an ati based laptop.

This was my problem and how i fixed it. So it may be helpfull for someone.

I have a laptop Asus N51TP which comes with ATI Mobility Radeon HD4650.

Opensuse works great with it with the opensource driver radeonhd, but with no aceleration, and todays softwares like googleearth wont work fine. Also some video codecs draws slow and one have to try with different players.

So i had today some freetime and decided to finally install to correct oficial driver. I searched the web and finded the one-clic install.
I will not use this **** again.

After installing and logging out i wasnt able to get X back running. Also the console with Ctrl+Alt+Fx was complete black, only the failsafe boot worked.
I tryed to get my xorg.conf.bkp back, but it didnt worked as before !!

Luckly Opensuse is a livecd and i readed on the web some more commands to try.

In my system i used yast in CLI to uninstall fglrx. Curiously there was 2 versions installed… G01 and G02.
I dont know what of them is better for my card. But i uninstalled both of them and restaurate the xorg.conf.bkp again.
And it worked as before !!!

Cool. I know a way to get my system back and be able to work tomorrow.

So i decided to reinstall only one of the fglrx drivers. And choose G02. Is this OK for my card? Also yast selects by default the debugmodule version, so i changed it to default.

It worked.
And after setting the resolution from yast CLI, i am writing this from X now.
3D aceleration works with glxgears.

But, and there will always be a BUT.

2D aceleration sucks. It was better with the opensource driver. I didnt lurker the internet yet to resolv this.

With the opensource driver i was able to choose a much bigger resolution than what my monitor is designed for. So everything was very small as i like.

Now i am not able in any form to choose a bigger resolution. And what i have is 1366x768 and GNOME is enormous.
Even trying to reduce the font size. Icons windows, dialog boxes and QT programs are all giant. But fonts looks better readable also with a size of 6.

Is there a way to force a bigger resolution???
If i am not able to do this, i will go back to the radeonhd driver.
Is just that i am more efficient in my work when i have many windows on the same screen.

I hope that my experience is helpful for someone and that someone else can give me a hint about my other problems.

Cheers.
Diego

Open a console window, su to root, and run amdcccle.
The most recent versions of fglrx don’t seem to be sax2 friendly - see if your can get what you need from the ATI/AMD tool.
Worked well for KDE, I hav no GNOME experience to draw on.

If fglrx_02 runs, it is the right one. fglrx_01 is Catalyst 9.3 driver, used for legacy GPUs. fglrx_02 is probably Catalyst 9.10 at the moment.

Stay away from 11.2 until you get comfortable at 11.1
ATI graphics on 11.2 sort of a work-in-progress(slow) at the moment

Do not run Sax anymore especially with fglrx driver.

Stick with the ati’s installer followed by an “aticonfig --initial”.

I have no problems at all with 9.11 Catalyst driver on opensuse 11.1, although i have some problems with the same driver in opensuse 11.2.

Thanks guys.

Now that i have tested the driver a bit, i should say that it works very fine.

I have no problems with framebuffer as i am used to have with nvidia, and no problems with hibernate (as i am used to have with nvidia).
I can enable and disable compiz without issues.
Everything looks very nice, fonts and so on.

I havent tested games or any 3D intensiv application.

I think that what happened to me, is that i trusted too much on automation tools of opensuse, and in this case, it broked it in big.

For the next time i already know what shouldnt i do.

Cheers.
Diego

On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 20:36 +0000, epsilon da wrote:
> It was painful to install the fglrx driver on opensuse 11.1 and i still
> dont know if i installed it right. I still have issues.
>
> I dont recomend to any linux user to buy an ati based laptop.
>
> This was my problem and how i fixed it. So it may be helpfull for
> someone.
>
> I have a laptop Asus N51TP which comes with ATI Mobility Radeon
> HD4650.

Strangely enough the radeonhd work DOES keep improving. I do agree
that ATI is still not the best option out there though.

I just finshed up a Mobility X1300 install where I compiled
the latest and greatest radeonhd stuff into openSUSE 11.1 (yes…
11.1). It worked great. Now the user can do videos… 3D
is still iffy at best though.

As a rule, TODAY, I would still avoid ATI Radeons on anything
new… but it does seem to be improving (hoping that next year
we’ll have something truly solid out there).

Avoid ATI’s proprietary driver… it’s junk…