Video card on Thinkpad T42

[James Wilkinson]

Rithin Shetty wrote:
>     I'm running Fedora core 2 on my IBM Thinkpad T42 for quite
> sometime now. T42 has "ATI Radeon 9600"  video card. However by
> default FC2 selects "VESA driver (generic)" as the video card. If I
> play video files the CPU utilization is close to 100% and it jerks.
>     Hence I changed the video card explicitly to "ATI Radeon 9600" by
> going to "System Settings ->Display". I then logged off and logged
> back in, the video files where playing very well and the CPU
> utilization was very low ( less than 10%).
>     But then if I put my laptop to sleep (using /proc/acpi/sleep
> interface) and restart it later, the  video card setting reverts back
> to "VESA driver (generic)" and I have the same problem with playing
> video files.

Odd.

So what happens if you fully shot down the laptop (use the halt command)
before putting it to sleep? Does it power back up again with the VESA
driver or the ATI one?

Also, Xavier Gonzalez wrote:
> I have the same problem as you do. I also have a T42 and I am runnig
> FC1. I also went to display configuration trying to fix it. However, I
> left my display configuration at VESA because the T42 has an "ATI
> Mobility Radeon 9600". I am assuming that the difference is the
> "Mobility".

It shouldn't make much difference from the software point of view. The
normal radeon driver should drive it, as far as I am aware (but then I
don't actually have such a beast on a Linux system).

> I tried going to ATI but there was not enough information about the
> driver.

Um. I understand that there are two drivers for these cards. ATi will
tell you about their closed-source driver, which will support 3D
acceleration on these cards. Fedora includes the radeon driver which (on
THESE cards) doesn't do acceleration.

I'm not sure I can help either of you much further, but someone else
might. Hope this helps, anyway.

James.

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