[plug] New toy closer to being usable

[Bernd Felsche]

Richard Meyer <meyerri at westnet.com.au> writes:

>I know here are some of you following my travails with my new Dell
>6400. 

>I've got the Radeon drivers installed and what a toil! It's not nearly
>as easy as doing Nvidia drivers with SUSE Linux, where you just click to
>install on the first YOU update.

Bug in the distro. I can see how those things can slip through even
beta-testing and the first two attempted escapes (release
candidates; for the politically correct).

>Anyway, I got SUSE 10.1 installed and it's rather nice - lots of
>bleeding edge software - they've changed a few things, like online
>updates are done by Red Carpet rather than Yast Online Update. This
>*fails* when it tries to install the first upgrades, but you can use
>YAST to start off YOU manually and it works as it always did.

>Anyway - after I installed, I had these huge bloated fonts and screens.
>I could tell Sax2 to change from 800x600 to 1280x800, but it was a waste
>of breath. Eventually I used this page
>http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/17340.html to install the
>drivers. There is one caveat - when I tried to run that long incantation
>of theirs about: sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx
>-b /usr/share/doc/packages/fglrx/sax2-profile - it failed - I eveutally
>found a README file that said to leave off everything after the
>"0=fglrx" part, and then it worked brilliantly - glxgears gave me 1550
>frames/sec, from a laptop chipset, so I'm happy.

Ludicrous. Who can *see* 1550 fps?

>Now to play with sound ...

>Btw - out of the box it identified the wireless chipset, and it
>complained that it couldn't find the firmware - so a download and a "cp"
>and I'll be there - it identified and installed the ethernet Broadcom
>4400. Disk partitions are all /dev/sd* and the DVD writer is /dev/sr0

SATA internal drive?

>It does *not* see the Ricoh 5-in-1 card reader at all - no messages in
>dmesg whatsoever.

Not supported, sadly. No drivers. No documentation available to
write drivers. Cheaper to get a 22in1 reader from Wollies for less
than $25. That also works as a USB-powered light.
-- 
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