Dell Inspiron XPS: system consistently freezes using ATI Radeon Mobility 9800 & FC3

[Ted Markowitz]

Gang,

Now that I have the latest ATI display driver compiled and working, I'm 
still experiencing the same inexplicable system freezes that led me to 
upgrading the driver in the first place. To date I'm still only able to 
consistently use the slower vesa driver up to 1600x1200, whereas the 
system display should be as fast as lightning with the new ATI Mobility 
Radeon 9800 chip which supports up to 1920x1200 with 3D acceleration.

If I use either the standard FC3 'radeon' or the new ATI 'fglrx' driver, 
even with a very vanilla xorg.conf, the system will inevitably just lock 
up with no error messages in any log. Sometimes it'll happen when I'm 
moving the cursor around the screen a few minutes after bootup, but it 
also occurs when I'm not touching the system at all, for example, when 
the xscreensaver is running and I've gone to sleep, so there's no 
pattern I can see.  Sigh...

The system is a brand new Dell Inspiron XPS with 1G of memory and plenty 
of free disk space. I'm running Fedora Core 3 (2.6.10-1.741_FC3), though 
this was also happening when I was still running FC2. Any ideas as to 
what's happening and how to fix it or at least how I could track down 
exactly what's causing the freeze would be VERY much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

--Ted
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