Yann’s Blog

So, long story short. I have a ThinkPad T60P, non-widescreen edition. I run Ubuntu 7.10 Gustry on it (after Windows did a suicide on its self).

It features a Mobility Radeon FireGL V5200 (the Widescreen models may use a V5250 - you’ve been warned) . Out of the box, the last fglrx driver to support this card is 8.35. Yes, the FireGL driver doesn’t support FireGL cards anymore, so says the top-notch driver division at ATI.

The 8.35 driver has some important breakages:

- Can’t suspend or resume (on Kernels with a SLUB allocator, like Ubuntu)

- Can’t hibernate (ditto)

- Weird things happen when you’re dual monitored and start X without a monitor connected.

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But, perhaps the 8.42.3 driver, hot off the presses, fixes some of that right?  I sought to find out.

The biggest hurdle is 8.42.3 doesn’t support FireGL cards. Ooops. But thanks to these forum posts and mini-patch, it is possible to use the card. For the record, I’m using the provided defaults for CARDIDs.

 http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5203

Next up, you have to grab a 8.35 installer packet, extract it (–extract), and then copy common/ati/control over /etc/ati/control, or you’re forever running around with a fantastic watermark in the right corner (whoever thought that was a great idea at ATI deserves to get shot).

So, after mucking with it for an hour, I’ve concluded

- Suspend works, but resume does not, when in multiple monitor mode (wtf)

- Ditto for hibernate

- Compiz runs, but doesn’t really work well at all.

This is in stark contrast to the NVidia-GLX driver, which I use on my desktop, and is a fantastic piece of work, never breaks, and delivers outstanding performance.

Maybe 8.42.4… Or RadeonHD. Or just buy a new laptop with n Nvidia card.

I’ve just published a quicky little program called softwedge which is designed to easily use many serial-port based barcode scanners (including many wireless Bluetooth scanners) with common X11 applications. It takes the serial port data stream and converts the characters into X11 keypress events which are sent via the XTest extension to the active cursor position.

There is no release yet, but you can get to the .git repository here: http://repo.or.cz/w/softwedge.git and check it out. It has been tested with and designed around a Metrologic FocusBT Bluetooth 2d-imager scanner.

Note that you don’t need this software if you have a USB based HID-compatible barcode scanner.

atphttpd is another old software application from the my software archives. Its a very simplistic, memory caching web server, back when it was all the rage to develop web servers, especially for performance It achieved quite some good benchmarks on a dual Pentium 166 running FreeBSD 3.0 - which should give you some idea of the age of the source.

Software license is BSD based. Feel free to mess with it, but word of warning, its not very good (this was a high-school-era programming project - design is not part of the picture).

atphttpd-04btar.gz