Radeon Mobility 9M

[John M. Pantone]

I have fedora up and running very nicely. ACPI working, all seems well, except 
the "built-in" driver for my Radeon Mobility 9M video doesn't allow for the 
all important switching to external monitor (projector) except at low res. 
Same with the driver from ATI. Irritating thing is that the "built in" driver 
in RH 9 works great...

Can I filch the driver from RH 9 ?

How ?

Thanks.

[Ben Russo]

John Pantone wrote:
> I have fedora up and running very nicely. ACPI working, all seems well, except 
> the "built-in" driver for my Radeon Mobility 9M video doesn't allow for the 
> all important switching to external monitor (projector) except at low res. 
> Same with the driver from ATI. Irritating thing is that the "built in" driver 
> in RH 9 works great...
>
> Can I filch the driver from RH 9 ?
>
> How ?
>
> Thanks.

I think the old RH9 XFree didn't have ATI Radeon 9K M support, so it 
used the SVGA driver,
which didn't have hardware acceleration and had problems with display 
suspend/sleep and resume.
I have a Dell Inspiron with a */beautiful  /*1600x1200 LCD display ( I 
like it better than my 23" desktop monitor).
I am SO happy with the new XFree in FC1b3, but I have never tried using 
the external display on it....

-Ben.

[Mike A. Harris]

On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Ben Russo wrote:
> > I have fedora up and running very nicely. ACPI working, all seems well, except 
> > the "built-in" driver for my Radeon Mobility 9M video doesn't allow for the 
> > all important switching to external monitor (projector) except at low res. 
> > Same with the driver from ATI. Irritating thing is that the "built in" driver 
> > in RH 9 works great...
> >
> > Can I filch the driver from RH 9 ?
>
> I think the old RH9 XFree didn't have ATI Radeon 9K M support, so it 
> used the SVGA driver,

Radeon Mobility 9000 support is in Red Hat Linux 9, however there 
is more than one different chip from ATI that is a Radeon 
Mobility 9000.  Also, there is no such thing as the "SVGA" 
driver.  You're probably refering to the XFree86 3.3.6 SVGA 
server XF86_SVGA which was included in Red Hat Linux 7.3 and 
older releases, but which was obsoleted officially for 8.0 and 
later.

If a particular card is not supported by XFree86 officially with 
native driver support, the hardware autodetection will assign it 
to the "vesa" driver which uses the card's own video BIOS for 
everything.  That driver is not supported by us, because if there 
are problems, they are BIOS bugs, and we obviously can't fix the 
BIOS.  ;o)  It does allow users of otherwise unsupported hardware 
to have a chance to use it minimally anyway.

Radeon Mobility 9000 should work in RHL 9 and Fedora Core 1.  If 
it doesn't feel free to report a bug in bugzilla, however realize 
that I don't have any Radeon Mobility hardware or laptops at all, 
so there's only so much I can attempt to do to investigate 
problems encountered.  Some problems might be fixed in CVS 
perhaps, and I often investigate backporting such fixes.

Hope this helps.

[Ben Russo]

Mike A. Harris wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Ben Russo wrote:
> > > I have fedora up and running very nicely. ACPI working, all seems well, except 
> > > the "built-in" driver for my Radeon Mobility 9M video doesn't allow for the 
> > > all important switching to external monitor (projector) except at low res. 
> > > Same with the driver from ATI. Irritating thing is that the "built in" driver 
> > > in RH 9 works great...
> > >
> > > Can I filch the driver from RH 9 ?
> >
> > I think the old RH9 XFree didn't have ATI Radeon 9K M support, so it 
> > used the SVGA driver,
>
> Radeon Mobility 9000 support is in Red Hat Linux 9, however there 
> is more than one different chip from ATI that is a Radeon 
> Mobility 9000.  Also, there is no such thing as the "SVGA" 
> driver.  You're probably refering to the XFree86 3.3.6 SVGA 
> server XF86_SVGA which was included in Red Hat Linux 7.3 and 
> older releases, but which was obsoleted officially for 8.0 and 
> later.

Yeah, VESA (Generic), that's what I meant.
I have a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop with a Radeon 9000 M video card
and my laptop display didn't work very well under RedHat 9.
Chromium/tuxracer etc. were so slow
there were unusable, and GL screensavers occassionally locked up
my machine.  Switching to virtual consoles or having the screen go
into power save mode and then returning to active display mode
sometimes left the screen "corrupt" with 100 or so lines of resolution 
at the
top or bottom of the screen all green and purple static.

Then after upgrading my RH9 box to the XFree that I found in the rawhide
channel, or using FC1b3 standard install,
I find that I get power save mode just fine, that the screen doesn't ever
lock up with screen savers, and I can play Chromium and Tux Racer at
full speed with no noticeable screen refresh (it is just smooooth video).

Anyway,  Thanks Mike.