On Thu, March 9, 2006 15:37, cdr wrote:
ATI chipsets
are crap in any mode. ;-)
Crap in what way?
1) You need a really recent
kernel (2.6.16'ish). It'll have the fixed
timer support,
i think i still have to boot with -noapic on Linux a
2.6.16-rc4-git10
to avoid weird timer issues, random 'spurius interrupt - nobody cared'
crap in dmesg and timer running about twice as fast
The patch that I linked to went into 2.6.16-rc5-bk12 (yesterday's), so
yeah, that's probably too old. ;)
Even with this, one of the boards I have (RS482) is reporting periodic
APIC errors, though this doesn't seem to affect the machine's stability.
2) Almost no
distro includes the required kernel to get the board to
work nicely. Expect a serious PITA when installing your distro. It's
the
interrupts are so screwd that knoppix freezed every 2 seconds, for
about 2 seconds, mouse and all. really was a hassle to get it setup with
such interruptions to input and processing and networking. but it did
eventually finish
Knoppix's kernel is probably much too old. You might want to try one of
the livecd's from ubuntu's beta release and see how things work.
now the biggest problem by far is ATIs horrible video
drivers. they
barely work in 2d: distortion artifacts when the cursor nears the screen
edge etc. unfortunately you need the fglrx binary/taint/driver-from-hell
to have a working VGA port or openGL, at least for me with
8.22.2.whatever and a mobility X300 or R200 or something
The X300 is now supported by the open source 'radeon' driver:
http://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R7.0/doc/html/radeon.4.html
You'll need xorg 6.9 or 7.0 though, and you'll only get 2D support.
Fortunately, it looks like basic 3d support is being worked on for the
X?00 seriers cards. I've had some good luck with "regular" 2d support and
my ATI X800XL, and the chipset built-in RS48x with this driver.
i wuld have definitely gotten an Nvidia chipset if i
they had a
small-form-factor Turion platform on the market. but all in all it works
fine now, aside from video quirks (lots of apps will crash with
'bad_pixmap' type stuff, i cant use superkaramba, or anything that uses
COMPOSITE for example, and forget about XGL/AIGLX)
AMD's new dual-core turion line (supporting DDR2) is being launched soon.
I'm pretty sure you'll see nvidia nforce 61x0 style laptops with it, since
AMD has been seen demoing turion kits with "similar" configurations. It's
always hard to tell what you'll see on the market when things finally come
to light..
later,
Steve