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

[Peter Lawler]

Hmmm,
The original poster mentions 'vanilla xogr.conf'.

Did they run fglrxconfig? I suspect that it has not.

The latest drivers, although requiring a couple of patches, work quite 
well. There's a thread on rage3d.org about FC3 and the latest ATI drivers.

Yes, Tuxracer is 3d. I have no problems with Celestia, Tuxracer, 
Chromium, Doom3, Stellarium. Although I do admit I'm not on a laptop.

Regards,

Pete.

Mike Hoy wrote:

> 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
>
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