Asus A6R

[Nicola Larosa]

Hussam Shebli wrote:
> Dear Sirs,
> I have a laptop Asus A6R the chipset is ATI Radeon Xpress 200M. I tried
> everything to make it work good on UBUNTU 6.06, but I did not successed.
> Please can you manage to make the next version to be flexible to work on
> more laptops.
> Thank you in advance

I have a HP dv5008EA notebook; the video adapter is the same. The ati
driver in X.org 7.0.0 on Dapper works well, but with no DRI nor
hardware-accelerated 3D graphics.

To get those, I had to install the awful proprietary ATI binary driver. I
succeeded in the end, but it wasn't easy.

Right before the Dapper release, an update broke the binary driver:

Bug #47371: [fglrx and Radeon 9200]
Can't start openoffice or blender after update to dapper
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/linux-restricted-modules-2.6.15/+bug/47371/+index

The required steps are detailed here:

[ATI proprietary driver] Ubuntu Dapper Installation Guide
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Dapper_Installation_Guide

(I just added a note to that page.)

Two more things were needed in my case. First, I found that the 8.24.8
driver works reasonably well, while the 8.28.8 broke some on-screen
widgets, so I stayed with that one.

Second, and rather appalling: this notebook has 128MB of dedicated video
memory, and that's what I configured in the BIOS at first. However, it
turns out that the awful binary driver cannot use those, so in addition I
had to enable UMA, the *shared* video memory, lowering the available RAM,
and slowing the video adapter.

To add insult to injury, DRI did not work if I set 32 or 64MB of UMA
memory: it required a full 128MB of it (leaving only 384MB of RAM, and
forcing me to upgrade to 1GB, but that's another story).

But in the end I have hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, and can run the
gorgeous Google Earth program (another proprietary blob, sigh).


-- 
Nicola Larosa - http://www.tekNico.net/

The journey really is all you get. The journey isn't everything,
it's the only thing. -- Phillip J. Eby, April 2006