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.