Re: New TiBook 550 w/Radeon Mobility question
"Christopher C. Chimelis" wrote:
>
> I know these things are brand new, but I was wondering if anyone else
> had a Radeon-equipped Powerbook yet?
Not yet, you lucky bastard. ;)
> * 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).
Someone posted a patch to enhance things to the linuxppc-dev list. I expect
benh to integrate it into his tree when he gets his TiBook or maybe even
earlier.
> * 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).
The driver only supports the chip in current CVS and the upcoming 4.2.0
release. There might be the usual porting issues though.
> * 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.
That's something else which will certainly improve when benh gets his TiBook.
:)
> In all, not bad (expected worse on such a new machine).
Yep, Apple's continuity in hardware equipment is very good.
> 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...
Great, you already managed to render me even less able to wait until I can
finally afford one of those lovely machines as well. Keep up the good work
with binutils and your other packages!
--
Earthling Michel Dänzer (MrCooper)/ Debian GNU/Linux (powerpc) developer
XFree86 and DRI project member / CS student, Free Software enthusiast
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