For this tutorial, examples are based upon the following system and OS:
- Toshiba A210-11P laptop
- Fluxbuntu Linux (amd64)
Disclaimer: This tutorial may not work for everyone, it is a general guide that has been tested on the above set-up. Results may vary.
Quite a number of laptops now use an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2600 (which I'll refer to as the HD 2600 from now on) which has a 256Mb GDDR RAM dedicated graphics aperture and up to 1023Mb RAM using shared memory.
The problem with these cards is the latest drivers for Linux (ati-driver-installer-7-11-x86.x86_64.run) don't technically support the HD 2600 for 3D acceleration, GL, etc. Instead the OpenGL rendering falls back to a Mesa 3D engine. This generally results in a very sluggish interface due to an awful refresh rate.
The set-up I now have has a decent refresh rate and uses the ATI OpenGL engine. I've only been able to reproduce this set-up with a specific way of installing Linux and the ATI drivers. So without further ado, let's get start out Linux installation.
The installation itself isn't 'customised' at all – it's a standard Fluxbuntu (amd64) install. However I made sure the laptop had an active physical connection to my router, ensuring an internet connection was available. When the installation asked if I wanted to install additional language support, I chose to accept.
After your installation has finished and your machine rebooted, login and proceed to install the following, via apt:
$ sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx-control
Once these are installed, proceed to make a quick change to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf in vi:
:%s/vesa/fglrx/g
Save your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and exit vi (:wq). At this point I rebooted my laptop.
After rebooting you'll notice that slim (the Fluxbuntu display/login manager) still won't run even with 'fglrx' as the driver. This is because the driver provided by the Ubuntu repository isn't up-to-date.
We need to get the latest ATI drivers. So, we need to do the following:
$ cd /usr/src
$ sudo wget https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/64bit/ati-driver-installer-7-11-x86.x86_64.run
Now we have the latest ATI drivers. To install, we need to simply give the run file executable permissions and run it:
$ sudo chmod +x ati-driver-installer-7-11-x86.x86_64.run
$ sudo ./ati-driver-installer-7-11-x86.x86_64.run
You'll need to choose 'Install Driver 8.433 on X.Org 7.1 and later releases 64-bit' option and accept the Terms and Conditions, then let the drivers install.
After this has completed, reboot your machine once more. You should find slim starts. Login, open a terminal and run the following:
$ fglrxinfo
The returned output should be:
display :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2600
OpenGL version string: 2.1.7059
You've now got a working driver for the HD 2600 that will allow 3D acceleration and no sluggish interface!
This article was originally published by CyberArmy.net in the CyberArmy Library. |