[plug] New toy closer to being usable

[Shannon Carver]

Richard Meyer wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-05-27 at 21:05 +0800, Bernd Felsche wrote:
>   
>> 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).
>>     
>
> Nope they don't supply Radeon drivers, and maybe with this release they
> don't supply Nvidia drivers either ..
>   
>>> 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?
>>     
>
> *blush* frames/min - ok a slip of the finger..
>   

Nah! glxgears measures in frames/sec, I think what Bernd was getting at, 
was the fact that it was ludicrous to need anymore than a few hundred 
fps a second as thats all the human eye can see.  I've read various 
reports of the eye "seeing" a lot more than the supposed 30 fps that 
we're apparently limited to.w

Course, if I was totally wrong about what the Ludicrous comment for, 
disregard above!

And yes, glx gears isn't a rock solid benchmarker, but it gives you a 
general idea of wether 3D acceleration is working correctly or not and 
about how good the card is.  For example, my Geforce 4 only gets 
900-1000, and 6600GT gets about 1500 as well.

>>> 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?
>>     
>
> Actually. from what I can find a PATA on a SATA controller.
>   
>>> 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.
>>     
>
> Yup, didn't expect it to do much, but since it's part of the machine, I
> decided to se whether Linus and co had found a way to tickle it into
> replying ....
>