ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955

hitemp · n00b Joined: 24 Oct 2010 Posts: 7

Hello all, well…. another Gentoo/Linux newbie here, I am currently unemployed so I decided to give Linux a shoot (yes, I know there are easier Linux distros to start out on but what can I say I like the penguin). Ok, so on with it

I installed Gentoo, (not quite that simple but I got it done) sound was easy enough, my bcm 4311 wireless card was a little bit more tricky but with a little patience it worked just fine, I installed xorg and then kde, things seemed to be going fine until I noticed some video card problems. The first thing I noticed was some screen savers and such (eyecandy) would not work and then I found that the ati catalyst control center would not open, too make a long story short I have read many post and a lot of tutorials all with different settings and advice (none of which seemed to work). I have tried different drivers and different kernel settings, I have started over twice and at this point I am ready to start fresh again.

I have an hp pavilion dv5139 laptop with an ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE) graphics card and I am not sure what data is old and out dated, weather I should use the ati drivers or the open source ones, I just need a push in the right direction, somewhere to start. Any help on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time, HiTemp
_________________
HP Pavilion dv5139us
CPU: AMD Turion(tm) 64 Mobile Technology ML-37
VGA: ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE) 128MB
Audio: ATI IXP SB400 AC'97 Audio Controller
ETH: Realtek RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+
WLAN: Broadcom BCM4311 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g

chithanh · Posted: Sun Nov 07, 2010 8:21 pm Post subject:

Your graphics chipset is not supported by current ati-drivers any longer. You have to use the open source drivers.

Set eselect opengl back to xorg, and get rid of ati-drivers including the fglrx kernel module. See http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xorg-config.xml how to configure the kernel for the open source drivers.

hitemp · n00b Joined: 24 Oct 2010 Posts: 7

Thanks for the info chithanh, I must have missed the part about the ati drivers :oops:

.

I was able to install the open source driver and xorg but that is were my problems began. After a little bit of research I found some information on hardware 3d acceleration ( http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/dri-howto.xml ) and that seemed to do the trick. I am not sure what this graphics card is capable of but as far as glxgears goes I am getting about 750 FPS in a small window (default?) and about 87 FPS in full screen (1280x800) and the UT 2004 demo plays fine. I guess that is as good as can be expected from a 5 year old laptop? Well... on to networking now.

Thanks, hiTemp
_________________
HP Pavilion dv5139us
CPU: AMD Turion(tm) 64 Mobile Technology ML-37
VGA: ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE) 128MB
Audio: ATI IXP SB400 AC'97 Audio Controller
ETH: Realtek RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+
WLAN: Broadcom BCM4311 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g

chithanh · Posted: Wed Nov 10, 2010 11:14 am Post subject:

glxgears fps is not indicative of anything.

You can get a bit more performance out of that chipset if you install mesa-7.9 (currently still in the x11 overlay) with USE="llvm" and enable kernel modesetting.

hitemp · n00b Joined: 24 Oct 2010 Posts: 7

chithanh · Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2010 7:22 am Post subject:

hitemp · n00b Joined: 24 Oct 2010 Posts: 7

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