Make your life happier - uninstall FGLRX drivers!
Hi, I thought I might share my experience regarding the FGLRX drivers, as they are still widely used, possibly also by many on this list. I own a Thinkpad W500 with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 graphics card. When I installed Debian Squeeze on it, I didn't seriously consider not installing the proprietary FGLRX drivers as they were by that time the only drivers providing hardware acceleration. Over the last year I noticed that my laptop would behave strangely in a variety of situations, most notably waking up from Hibernate and Resume would sometimes take unbelievably long, i.e. up to ten minutes or even more. I never managed to identify the culprit. I saw that there was high CPU usage, but I couldn't identify what was causing it. Sometimes, the X process seemed to be the cause. But, hey, I didn't really think that this might have something to do with the drivers. Now, over the last few weeks, things got worse: Occasionally, up to two-three times a day my laptop would suddenly freeze so that I had to hard reset it. (tried to reach it via SSH, but that didn't work either). I never found any entries hinting towards a possible cause in /var/log/syslog, so, no kernel panic or anything to that effect, the system simple froze. Now, when I installed wheezy on a USB disk I noticed that 3D graphics work nicely now without FGLRX, so I installed X from squeeze-backports and removed the FGLRX driverse and since then I am a happy person again: Not only have the freezes gone away, but also the mysterious delays in resuming from hibernate and suspend are gone. My laptop works completely flawlessly, including 3D graphics, and all just because I purged the proprietary drivers. So, my advise to any Debian user would be: If you want a happy life - get rid of the proprietary fglrx drivers. Thanks, Johannes -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/kd0ofr$uoq$1...@ger.gmane.org
Re: Make your life happier - uninstall FGLRX drivers!
On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 12:27:25PM CET, Ralf Mardorf ralf.mard...@rocketmail.com said: I can confirm that on Linux 3D support by modern versions of X FLOSS drivers is very good, especially for ATI cards the proprietary driver isn't maintained for not really old cards on Linux. Even nouveau for NVIDI graphics today is ok in most of the cases. I suspect that for gamers proprietary drivers are still important, I don't know. For hard real-time audio users it's always good to compare current proprietary and FLOSS drivers, just to ensure that the driver has the less negative impact as possible to hard real-time audio abilities. Usually FLOSS drivers should be a good choice for hard real-time audio too, but I wouldn't put my shirt on that. Support for new cards may also require proprietary drivers. Eg. for my Lenovo T530, nouveau from wheezy or sid does not work. I was told I had to wait for 3.6 kernel and a recompiled Xorg. So I use nvidia proprietary until I can switch to nouveau (which works better when you've got a laptop with an optional external screen) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130114121350.ga11...@rail.eu.org
Re: Make your life happier - uninstall FGLRX drivers!
On 14/01/13 13:00, Johannes Rohr wrote: Hi, I thought I might share my experience regarding the FGLRX drivers, as they are still widely used, possibly also by many on this list. [...] So, my advise to any Debian user would be: If you want a happy life - get rid of the proprietary fglrx drivers. Thanks, Johannes Hi. How is power management working on your graphics card with the Radeon free software drivers? In my case, on an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3200, the GPU gets very hot and the cooling fan works all the time making a lot of noise. And I'm not the only one, see [1]. So I'm forced to use fglrx, and it's working great for me (hibernate and suspend works without any issue). 1. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50327 Regards, -- Adrian Fita -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/50f47006.6070...@gmail.com
