Fedora 16 and switchable graphics - ATI Radeon HD 6600M video(Sony VAIO SA25GB)

[fernando at lozano.eti.br]

Hi there,


>> So, does Linux in general and F16 support switchable graphics? How do
>> I use that?
>
>Support for switchable graphics on Linux is not stable enough for
>general use. If you want to know the details search the Phoronix news
>articles.
>
>That said, your other option is to go to the BIOS and turn off your ATI
>graphics entirely. After that Linux should use your Intel graphics
>hardware. Once ATI adds support for the latest version of X server, you
>can turn the ATI hardware back on the same way. In any case, you should
>be turning off one of them for better battery life since switchable
>graphics is non-functional.

I made tree tries, none worked:

- The VAIO notebook doesn't have a BIOS option to turn off the ATI video. But it has a "stamina/speed" tootle on the keyboard. Under Windows, changing the toogle makes the screen go blank for a few seconds and back, supposedly to change the video driver. I tried to keep the tootle on "stamina" and reboot, then I created a xorg.conf for the intel video driver. Didn't worked. (But is "intel" the correct Xorg driver for the Intel HD graphics from the sandy bridge chipset?)

- ATI released a new proprietary driver, version 11.11. I saw conflicting resports about this fixing or not fixing Gnome Shell issues. For me it didn't worked.

- I tried keeping the tootle on "speed" and created a xorg.conf using the driver "radeon". (This is the open source driver, right?) But it didn't worked.


I have not tested the external monitor using the vesa driver (basic video), which is the only one working so far. If it doesn't, the notebook will be pretty close to useless to me. I refuse to use Windows and doing my Linux work unside a VM.


[]s, Fernando Lozano