Make your life happier - uninstall FGLRX drivers!
Hi,
I thought I might share my experience regarding the FGLRX drivers, as
they are still widely used, possibly also by many on this list.
I own a Thinkpad W500 with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 graphics card.
When I installed Debian Squeeze on it, I didn't seriously consider not
installing the proprietary FGLRX drivers as they were by that time the
only drivers providing hardware acceleration.
Over the last year I noticed that my laptop would behave strangely in a
variety of situations, most notably waking up from Hibernate and Resume
would sometimes take unbelievably long, i.e. up to ten minutes or even
more. I never managed to identify the culprit. I saw that there was high
CPU usage, but I couldn't identify what was causing it. Sometimes, the X
process seemed to be the cause. But, hey, I didn't really think that
this might have something to do with the drivers.
Now, over the last few weeks, things got worse: Occasionally, up to
two-three times a day my laptop would suddenly freeze so that I had to
hard reset it. (tried to reach it via SSH, but that didn't work either).
I never found any entries hinting towards a possible cause in
/var/log/syslog, so, no kernel panic or anything to that effect, the
system simple froze.
Now, when I installed wheezy on a USB disk I noticed that 3D graphics
work nicely now without FGLRX, so I installed X from squeeze-backports
and removed the FGLRX driverse and since then I am a happy person again:
Not only have the freezes gone away, but also the mysterious delays in
resuming from hibernate and suspend are gone. My laptop works completely
flawlessly, including 3D graphics, and all just because I purged the
proprietary drivers.
So, my advise to any Debian user would be: If you want a happy life -
get rid of the proprietary fglrx drivers.
Thanks,
Johannes
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