Engineering a New World

Ubuntu 9.04 with Windows 7 Loaded in a VirtualBox

Unfortunately, after my super-rosy post yesterday on how easy it was to install Ubuntu drivers and get my ATI Radeon HD 3200 up and running with Ubuntu 9.04, I’ve unfortunately run into a number of graphics & general performance issues and other various funky issues that I’m still having to investigate.

While I’m sure that I’ll reach some more conclusions on this, hopefully someone else has run into same, and can assist me.  They’re not show-stoppers, but are pretty annoying.

• Catalyst Control Center: After my first reboot after I triumphantly installed Ubuntu and the factory drivers from AMD, I have not again been able to get in to the AMD Catalyst Control Center — in either  user-mode or root-mode.  Tailing /var/log/messages, I get the following:

   Jun 14 20:28:21 turbotad kernel: [35343.066031] amdcccle[13174] general protection ip:a48c4be sp:bfc8be88 error:0

  Not sure what that means, but I simultaneously lost the ability to do Google Earth in 3D.  Hm.

• Google Earth: After one successful load and then reboot, Google Earth refuses to respect that I have a 3D driver loaded.  It just says that it’s now going to start in emulation mode, and of course then performs terribly as it’s only using the CPU.  Not sure what happened.   Compiz still works just fine (albeit much slower than when I was running Fedora 10)
• Firefox is sluggish - very sluggish: It feels like everthing I’m doing in Firefox (including typing this blog post) is attached to a spoon in cold honey.  Typing has a lag to it, Flash and JS performance is slow, and it gets REAL slow as you have a couple of tabs open.  My laptop has 4GB RAM so I’m not RAM-hobbled, and while a Turion RM-72 is nothing to write home about in terms of speed, the box is significantly more responsive in Windows Vista.  Which is horrible.
• Slowest VirtualBox Performance I’ve Seen: Despite other issues I was having with graphics drivers, I was able to get VirtualBox up and running on Fedora 10 and Fedora 11, and after loading up a VM on Windows 7, I was able to easily work in the VM in full-screen, just like it was a single-core host computer.  But now, on Ubuntu, for some odd reason, I can barely even control the mouse, it is so sluggish.  So, that’s another one I have to investigate.

Anyhow, no idea how many of these issues have an easy resolution, but I figured I’d at least post it so that I could start with the process.