Hello everybody,
I’ve recently installed openSuse on my laptop. Everything seems be OK but graphic card driver. I use open driver radeon.
Are there any possibilities how to reduce consumption? My laptop is also very noisy what is upsetting me more than high consumption.
I’ve tried to install proprietary driver but dragging windows and scrolling was extremely slow, also kwin didn’t work. And I think that power saving wasn’t good either.
openSuse 11.3 64bit, HP ProBook 4710s, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330
I think you should actually address this question to the people who work on the radeon driver (openSUSE ships with radeonHD, not radeon).
Your problem with the proprietary driver is that you probably didn’t had all the dependencies that were required, so the driver installed but the kernel module most likely didn’t build properly. Here I can probably help you (with the proprietary driver):
Remove all the stuff you have from the proprietary driver:
rpm -e rpm -qa | grep fglrx # this will remove all rpm’s of FireGL.
go into /usr/share/ati and run (sh fglrx-uninstaller.sh) fglrx-uninstaller.sh # this will clear any manual installs.
Open Konsole, type “su -” and give root credentials. Then pop this command “zypper update” and update your system.
Make sure you have the necessary packages to build the kernel module installed on your system. ATI proprietary driver requires some 32bit packages for 64bit install (most people seem not to be aware of this), but anyhow… here’s the ‘zypper’ syntax to install all the packages you need for 32/64bit systems:
*** 32BIT** - zypper in kernel-source qt3 compat compat-libstdc++ libstdc+±devel libgcc xorg-x11-libs xorg-x11devel Mesa-devel fontconfig-devel expat freetype2-devel zlib-devel gcc make
*** 64BIT** - zypper in kernel-source compat-32bit qt3-32bit libstdc++ libgcc xorg-x11-libs-32bit xorg-x11-devel-32bit Mesa-devel-32bit fontconfig-32bit expat-32bit freetype2-32bit zlib-32bit gcc make
That should pull all the dependencies you require to successfully install the FireGL (fglrx) proprietary driver.
Reboot your system and then install fglrx driver, you can download it from Global Provider of Innovative Graphics, Processors and Media Solutions | AMD. After the driver has been installed, before you reboot to enable it, make sure you always (for example after a kernel update) check the contents of /usr/share/ati/fglrx-install.log so you know if the kernel module was properly built or not. You don’t need high skills to check this, just read the lines, it will make sense to you
If all good, reboot and enjoy true 3D through FireGL Also as I sidenote, I don’t use KDE, but in case you believe that 3D isn’t enabled on KDE, you might need to press “SHIFT+ALT+F12” to enable composite on Kwin. Now your KDE Desktop must be performing way better than with any open driver
I hope this helps, I’ve tried to keep it as simple as I could. As for the radeon or radeonhd drivers, I really can’t help you much, but someone else on the forum might see it and point ya the right way.
By the way, ATI proprietary drivers do install a small daemon and do enable a far better thermical control than the open source drivers, so this might actually be a win for you
