Only a day after complaining about my ATI card running under Ubuntu, I seem to have a solved a lot of the issues. Slightly embarrassing. To recap – my system is set up like this:

HP 8510p laptop with an ATI HD 2600 mobility card running Ubuntu 8.04 with a 1680×1050 screen, often connected to an external monitor (same resolution).

My ideal setup would be like this:

• ‘Big desktop’ mode when plugged into an external monitor, allowing windows to be dragged between screens.
• When the monitor is unplugged, to continue working on the laptop screen, without restarting Xorg.
• Compiz-fusion providing ‘expose’ functionality amongst other things.
• Generally not having crashes would be nice.

My first forays into the world of ATI/Linux video configuration went like this:

1. No dual-head out of the box, Compiz-fusion won’t run on the default open source drivers.
2. Installing the proprietary drivers enables Compiz, but no obvious way to dual-head.
3. Running the ati-config command enables dual-head, but it sets up two screens and displays in the xorg.conf. This means that windows cannot be dragged between them, and it seems to only support hardware acceleration on the primary screen. Also it seems unstable – xorg often crashes on a restart(ctrl-alt-backspace)

The Solution

After browsing various blogs and forum threads, I arrived at an xorg.conf that works for me, using the proprietary fglrx driver. The important sections are listed below. Note:

• DesktopSetup is set to ‘vertical,reverse’ in order to have my second monitor above my laptop.
• In the Display subsection, virtual is set to 1680 x 1050 – the size of the second monitor.

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Configured Video Device"
	Boardname	"ATI Radeon"
	Busid		"PCI:1:0:0"
	Driver		"fglrx"
	Screen	0
	Vendorname	"ATI"
	Option		"MergedFB"	"off"
	Option		"DesktopSetup"	"vertical,reverse"
	Option		"Mode2"	"1680x1050"
	Option		"ForceMonitors"	"lvds,vga-0"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"Default Screen"
	Device		"Configured Video Device"
	Monitor		"Configured Monitor"
	Defaultdepth	24
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth	24
		Modes		"1680x1050@60"
		Virtual	1680	1050
	EndSubSection
EndSection

xRandR

With xorg configured correctly, I’m using xRandR to switch between desktop configurations. Simply running ‘xrandr’ in the console should give you a list of possible configurations. For me, option 0 is my ‘big desktop’ – 1680 x 2100, with option 1 being just the single laptop screen. The commands to switch between the two are therefore:

xrandr -s 0

and

xrandr -s 1

So I’m making a valiant effort to move to Linux, and stay in Linux.  I like how easy it is to install development stuff (servers, compilers, libraries) and I like the ethos of open source software. I installed Ubuntu a few months ago, and again on my new HP laptop. Everything is snappy and responsive, but I have had a few problems…

General ATI troubles

I had already heard that Nvidia cads tend to play better with Linux, but the laptop was a bargain for the spec, and the card is a new HD2600. It’s a very powerful gaming card, but it’s been a drag under Linux.

Compiz-fusion doesn’t work unless I install the proprietary drivers.

Compiz-fusion doesn’t work if I’m using my external monitor in a dual-head configuration.

I can’t drag windows between screens.

The movie players Totem and VLC crash hard when I’m using the proprietary drivers and dual-head.

Sleep

As with falling, sleeping is not the problem. Restoring is where things go wrong – and I’m often faced with a blank screen when trying to bring the computer back from sleep. Also, it doesn’t hibernate. At all.

Browser problems

I’m a bit of an Opera fan, and it seems a bit ropey under Linux. The Flash player seems to be a bit CPU heavy in it sometimes. Gmail and other ajaxy sites sometimes act a bit strangely (sort of hangs after sending a request – needs a refresh to bring it back). Some fonts are rendered a little squashed on my widescreen. I think it’s mainly Arial.

Still, on balance I like Linux a whole lot, and I’m very grateful to everyone involved for their hard work. I’m not really posting this as a winge – more as an honest report of my experience so far in case others are considering the move. I’ll be looking into fixes and I’ll report back if any of these situations improve.

*Actually, they still do things in Windows here. In VirtualBox, inside Linux. Which deserves a post of its own.