XFree86 4.3 & ATI Radeon Mobile 7500 (IBM Thinkpad A31)

jeremyhu · n00b Joined: 22 Apr 2003 Posts: 3

I tried installing XFree 4.3 a few months back when it first came out (before I switched over to gentoo). I had horrible results with getting it to work properly. I believe there was a problem with the radeon driver working properly with my laptop since everything worked fine when getting 4.3 up and running on my desktop.

My question is this. Has anyone successfully gotten 4.3 running on a laptop that uses the ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 graphics chipset? I will be trying 4.3 with gentoo's patches in a few weeks, but I was wondering if I should expect much this time around.

chefakito · Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2003 8:24 pm Post subject:

I've got the same laptop as you and except for ACPI (it doesn't seem to work 100%) i've managed to get everything working with Xfree 4.3.

glx gives me ~700fps(vs ~130fps unaccelerated) and 2d seems accelerated as well.

I'm pretty happy with all of this, considering this is my first linux install that I plan on using as a primary OS.

PS: you know how to get the screen to turn off after a certain amount of inactivity? Or other PM functions?

jeremyhu · n00b Joined: 22 Apr 2003 Posts: 3

what ebuild of XFree86 4.3 are you using?

Could you do 'qpkg -I -v -nc xfree' and let me know what it says (If you don't have qpkg, it's really useful, and you can get it by doing 'emerge gentoolkit')

Also, would you mind sending me your /etc/X11/XF86Config file in case I need to debug problems. I would greatly appreciate it. Hopefully the problem was fixed since I tried last, but you never know.

As for other PM stuff, you can control that with 'apmd' (put options in /etc/conf.d/apmd and make sure apmd starts at boot 'rc-update add apmd default) or if you use KDE, just open up the control panel and goto the 'Energy Control' icon (I'm not sure the exact english name since I'm using spanish i18n... but that's the translation)

--Jeremy
jeremyhu AT cory.eecs.berkeley.edu

chefakito · Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2003 1:34 am Post subject:

#qpkg -I -v -nc xfree
x11-base/xfree-4.3.0-r2
x11-base/xfree-drm-4.3.0

Relavent portions of XF86Config:

# This loads the GLX module
Load "glx"
Load "dri"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Radeon M7"
Driver "radeon"
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "True"
VideoRam 16384
# Insert Clocks lines here if appropriate
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection
---------------------------

as for the exact instructions I followed, here they are

I hope this helps you!