New TiBook 550 w/Radeon Mobility question
I know these things are brand new, but I was wondering if anyone else had
a Radeon-equipped Powerbook yet?
For anyone who's interested, here's my progress so far:
* Installing wasn't easy. I used the r3 potato CD and worked around the
"video=ofonly" situation...after that, it wasn't too hard to get
finished. Finding info on that kernel option, though, took a bit.
I had limited time to get the ISO, so I didn't try to find the woody
install ISOs (sorry).
* Upgrading to unstable went as I expected and I ran into no problems that
I couldn't get through.
* I got BenH's latest (as of yesterday) kernel source and compiled a
custom kernel. The Radeon FB on this variety of chip support still
seems to be immature. It booted into 640x480 (making the text a very
small subset of this giant screen). When I used fbset to scale it up
to 1152x768, the FB was VERY slow, taking nearly 30 secs to display
a screenful of a manpage. Scaling it back down made it faster, but
not nearly as fast as the OF FB (so I switched back to that for now).
* Because of the above, I haven't been able to get X going reliably on it.
I've barely tried so far, though, in all fairness. I managed to get it
working once, but at 640x480 and the keymap was fubar. That was using
the FB Xserver, not the 'ati' server, which failed to detect the adapter
at all (I tried specifing BusID also, which didn't work).
* Power management doesn't seem to work very well yet with this PMU. I
don't think they changed it, but the framebuffer differences cause
odd things to happen when it tries to go to sleep. I haven't tried
beyond putting the screen to sleep yet.
* Haven't tried sound, but I did insmod the same modules that are for
the iBooks and they detected the hardware. I'll have to run a few
tunes through it soon and see what happens.
* For the curious, I plugged in my Logitech optical mouse to one of the
USB ports and it worked in OS X with all of the buttons :-) Hello new
gaming machine! :-P
In all, not bad (expected worse on such a new machine). I like the laptop
and will get quite a bit of use out of it despite the above (I don't
usually run X often and can always go to OS X if I need a GUI for
something). I also understand that these things will improve over time,
so I'm sure I'll be testing it out quite a bit and will try to provide
reports to the list...
C
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