Nate Carlson wrote: > Be sure you check and make sure the ATI card you get is supported by the > free drivers; apparently, many of the newer ones aren't yet. I wouldn't be > surprised if ATI's binary drivers sucked just as much as NVidia's. This is a really difficult issue for me. I really, really appreciate having the open ATI drivers... but I have had a pretty good experience with building the binary drivers (for debian) on my Dell 8100. That is, until the screen died. So now I have tentatively purchased an HP zd7260us from Circuit City. I say tentatively because I got an "open box" model which, unlike their change in policy, I *can* return w/o a re-stocking fee within 14 days. I like this laptop because I get a lot of pixels 1680x1050 (in a body building, luggable format) and it's a reasonable value. The nVidia drivers cause the zd7260us to hang hard (power down is the only option). FFI: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=376642#post376642 There have been no replies to nvNews or zd7000 forums. Nor have I had a response to my bug report to nVidia in a week. An e-mail to HP Pavilion Notebook Support has resulted in some polite followups (but haven't effectively moved passed level 1 support). I'll be the first to admit that I've borked the kernel or modelines somehow.... But various attempts have not made it any better. The current nv driver in debian does not support this GPU. However, I have a plan to build a version of it (and stay within DFSG insomuch as one can with a straight face while talking about nVidia). http://lists.debian.org/debian-x/2004/07/msg00847.html Alas I am running with vesa :-( So, hey, I don't need a name brand, right? I don't need M$. My friends have had a good experience with Power Notebooks, so why not get a Sager NP4790 instead? http://www.powernotebooks.com/specs/Sager/4790specs.php This one sports ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON™ 9700 (with 128 MB over 64MB) and more memory at about the same price. Well, let's see now about drivers. ATI's *proprietary* driver doesn't yet support this GPU: http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/Linux_376_Release_Notes.html So it's not surprising that support hasn't shown up in any of the likely places (Xfree86 or X.org -- unless the GPU is listed as something else like Mobility M9+): http://cvsweb.xfree86.org/cvsweb/xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/drivers/ati/atichip.c?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup http://freedesktop.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/drivers/ati/atichip.c?content-type=text%2Fplain&rev=1.1.3.2&root=xorg I'm open to suggestions... or maybe just a beer to drown my video driver angst! --Tom _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list