[hllug] Laptop with ati X300 chip set upgrade experience & other adventures!

From: Lee Parmeter <geek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: hllug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:13:03 -0600
Earlier in the week I decided to upgrade my Dell i9300 laptop from Ubuntu
8.04 to the latest 8.10 release. This particular machine has been upgraded
 several times over the last couple and years and was successfully upgraded
to 8.10, at least mechanically. The only snafu was the ATI video support.
After the upgrade, the LCD screen could be made to go to a state of
blinking pretty vertical color bars and cause the Linux kernel to lock-up.

So, feeling a little let down but willing to blame previous non-supported
software installations as part of the problem, I decided to do a complete
"fresh" install of Ubuntu 8.10. The initial result of this adventure was
that first I found that the default open source ATI Radeon drivers would
lock-up the machine solid. Installing the proprietary AMD ATI "fglrx"
drivers, I was able to reproduce the "pretty blinking vertical color bars"
and the Linux kernel lock-up.

As a result of Ubuntu failing utterly, I decided to install Fedora 10.
Things were a little better with Fedora in that the open source ati Radeon
drivers did not lock-up the machine. I went to the Fedora Forums and found
that the ATI "fglrx" in the fedora repositories was also giving people with
ati video cards grief, particularly those with M200 and X1100 series cards;
my Dell laptop has a X300 chip set. However, there was an update available
in the Fedora "testing" repository that was working properly and a "Howto"
with instructions on installing the fglrx driver. After installation of the
patched driver my laptop's video card was working better than it had even
under the working Ubuntu 8.04 installation. By better I mean that I could
now watch HD recordings from MythTV on my laptop without dropped frames and
the mythfrontend application freezing.

Below is a Link to HOWTO concerning installation of the "fglrx" driver in
the Fedora "testing" repository:

<http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=155503>

It will take a few days to get all my favorite applications installed, mail
configured and etc. But the future looks bright again!

----

I have also been upgrading some of my machines at home with new
motherboards, CPU's and etc. Part of the upgrade was to add additional TV
tuner cards to my file server/MythTV backend to enable recording of Digital
and HD stations from the cable TV service. I am also building a new MythTV
frontend that will be able to play the Digital and HD recordings on our old
projection HDTV in the living room. I'll post more about this adventure
over the next couple of weeks.

-- 
Lee Parmeter
http://www.bubbasgeek.com

"When it comes to Vista: just say NO! If you're not ready for Linux, buy a
MAC!" - Lee Parmeter
"God is not a republican or a democrat nor is His government a democracy!"
- Lee Parmeter
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[hllug] Laptop with ati X300 chip set upgrade experience & other adventures!

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