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

[Mike Hoy]

sorry to hear you too have an ATI card. I have the radeon and I have 
absolutely no problems at 1024 x 768. and i would never even attempt to 
use 3d beyond say tux racer (is that even 3d?)

that's my laptop and it's  a compaq p4 with 512 mb of ram and 64 ded. to 
the video card.
so my advice is to give up on 3d and high res. ati is not exactly linux 
friendly beyond the minimums. I consider myself lucky to get 1024 x 768.

you could sell the laptop and then buy a new one with nvidia graphics. 
i'm told that's the way to go.

mike hoy

Ted Markowitz wrote:

> 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