ATI Radeon X1270 and Fedora 8

The continuation of the saga that is one of my previous blog entries. I have been using "the other" OS for a while now, and have not noticed that my Linux did not use the correct resolution until I tried to view some pictures on it and they were odd shaped to say the least ;)
So I checked and surely the screen resolution was set to 1280x1024 and would not budge to anything higher (even if manually inserted as Modes line into the xorg.conf). After googling for a while I stumbled upon this and this site.

Sadly the radeonhd driver can not offer 2D and 3D acceleration yet, but I am not that much into games so I don't mind right now... If I need 3D I can still switch to fglrx driver (on 1280x1024 max).
Vieos work quite ok on xshm driver for xine and work ok in Kaffeine (mplayer does not perform ok - neither video nor alsa seems to be ok with it).

glxgears runs on about 600 in windowed mode and drops to about 90 in full screen mode.

If you had better results with the specified card please don't hesitate to leave me a note...

Fedora 8 on HP Compaq 6715b laptop

First run:

• check media (check ok)
• continue (anaconda crash...)

reboot...

• check media (skip)
• continue (no X install method - X detection failed)
• ... let disk druid do the partitioning (remove linux only partitions and create new ones - we'll see how Vista likes that one)...
• install Grub on /dev/sda6 (MBR is reserved for vista because it behaved badly on previous installs)

reboot... (boot into Vista to see if all is ok with it... checked out ok, used neosmart easybcd to change the boot loader)
another reboot... booting to Fedora 8

• Booted into text mode, system-config-display croaked...
• off to the drawing board...
• somehow eth0 failed to establish connection via dhcp... ran dhcpclient manually
• installed livna repo (http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f8.html#yum)
• installed amarok, mplayer, xine (the goodies we need to have a distro multimedia capable)
• installed ATI proprietary drivers from livna kmod-fglrx and
  
• ran yum update to get current (~450MB worth of upgrades... on 100mbit link + package upgrade time = ~1h)

reboot

• (forgot to change the runlevel so had to do init 5 first) but other than that PERFECT Xorg picture! yaaay!
• fglx_glxgears measures around 200 in window mode and ~60 in fullscreen mode 1680x1050
• tried to install some packages via pirut (system-config-packages) and got _REALLY_ slow download speed and unresponsive pirut windows at time.
• ATI driver seems to be having some problems at times (creates shadows on parts of display that dissapear only after exiting X server session).
  

The conclusion:
After twiddling around a bit and setting up software and the hardware the conclusion is that f8 is currently not really ready for everyone (for instance my wifi card did not work correctly, networkmanager did not discover any wifi networks and even manual configuration failed - keeps asking for password. I could not install ndiswrapper from an rpm package because there was no kmod for the updated kernel I am running... so unusable for me -
untill I find enough time to get all the bits and pieces running that is ;)

PS: suspend to disk works perfectly now as it seems (only tested a couple of times) (suspend to RAM fails to awake again

UPDATE (27.12.2007): after running yum update today all the above mentioned defects were fixed. WiFi now works perfectly - without ndiswrapper even and the later can be installed since there is a kernel update available now... So thumbs up for Fedora 8! I'm off fiddling with it now ;)