Posts tagged ati

HP Photosmart C4580 - just works on Fedora 13

Fedora 13 Driver Support is Just Awesome

May 28th

Posted by iphoneTad in linux

8 comments

I just need to take two seconds and rave about the driver support in Fedora 13.

Fedora installations on servers have always been notoriously painless for me, and for the last 5 years I’ve always had less trouble standing up a new Sun or Dell server on Fedora than on Windows.  No driver disks, no nothing – just fire it up and it goes.

Desktops have been another matter entirely.  If you read my other posts on ATI Radeon Drivers on Fedora, you’ll see I’ve had all sorts of issues getting Fedora (or any Linux distro for that matter) to work well with my 3D ATI cards and other assorted laptop drivers.

HP Photosmart C4580 - just works on Fedora 13

My HP Photosmart C4580 - just works on Fedora 13

Enter Fedora 13.  One of the touted features of F13 “Goddard” is “…enhanced driver support.”  Now, I had no idea what to expect, but I guess I just hoped it’d be better than before.  Wow, how wrong I am.  Driver installations are now just totally painless and are even better than a Mac in terms of “just working”.  Specifics:

  • 3D Drivers: For the first time I’ve ever encountered on any Linux distro, the machine fired up and just worked with the integrated ATI Radeon 3200HD controller that I have on my laptop.  No install, no drivers, no updates – I just installed the stock, no-options desktop and it fired up the Radeon with no problems, and ran Compiz just by checking the little “enable desktop effects” button in CCSM.  BLAM.  Very pleased – that usually is a majorly painful process.
  • Codecs: Totem and VLC are now nearly impossible to thwart in terms of codec support.  I just fire up Totem, and if it starts to try to play something it doesn’t have a codec for, I just click the little “search” button, and it finds the gstreamer plugins it needs to play the media.  DVD/CSS, h.264, WMV, etc all played without me having to hit up YUM.  BLAM!
  • Printer Support: This was a royal suprise to me.  I have a wi-fi HP Photosmart C4580 printer/scanner.  I just opened up the printer dialog and clicked on “add” and then under network printers hit “find”.  It then proceeded to automatically find my C4580 on the wi-fi network, and automatically installed drivers for it.  A test-page printed out with color support immediately and with no fuss.  That took about 1/4 of the time it’s taken me to set that printer up on Windows or Mac.  Amazing!

So, hats off to the Fedora team and the work that’s gone into driver support for this release.  I’m truly impressed.

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Ubuntu 9.04 with Windows 7 Loaded in a VirtualBox

Ubuntu: Performance Issues

Jun 14th

Posted by TurboDad in linux

6 comments

Ubuntu 9.04 with Windows 7 Loaded in a VirtualBox

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.

, , , , , ,