Archive for April, 2007
Beryl + Ubuntu + ATI Mobility 9000
April 14, 2007 12:07 amSpent some time today trying to get Beryl to work on my Toshiba Tecra S1 running Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 beta with ATI Mobility 9000 graphics card. To start I used the following xorg.conf settings:
Section “Device”
Identifier “ATI 9000″
Driver “radeon”
Option “DRI” “true”
Option “RenderAccel” “true”
Option “EnablePageFlip” “true”
Option “XAANoOffscreenPixmaps”
Option “DisableGLXRootClipping” “true”
Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “true”
Option “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true”
Option “AGPMode” “4″
Option “AccelMethod” “XAA”
Option “ColorTiling” “on”
Option “AGPFastWrite” “on”
Option “GARTSize” “64″
BusID “PCI:1:0:0″
EndSection
Note that I used the driver radeon instead of fglrx and with xgl loaded. With these settings, I could get direct rendering on, can check yours by:
$ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: Yes
After restarting Xorg, installed Beryl with the following command:
sudo aptitude install beryl beryl-manager emerald-themes
After the installation, I started the Beryl manager, however Beryl doesn’t start automatically. I ran the command beryl in the terminal it returns with the following error:
Checking maximum texture size : failed
Root window size (1280/1024) is bigger then maximum texture size (1024×1024)
From some online resources, I find out that I can use driconf to set the graphics card to have allow_large_textures = 2. However this didn’t solve the problem for me, later I found that I can set GARTSize to higher in xorg.conf. I tried:
Option “GARTSize” “256″
After restarting Xorg, I was able to run beryl without the error given before. However it returns a white screen, restarted Xorg again and find that direct rendering is off. It was found that setting the GARTSize to anything larger than 64 will set direct rendering to off. Knowing that I couldn’t get it to work on 1280×1024 on the external monitor (19″ Xerox XA7), I tried it on lower resolution 1024×768 and got that to work with the following screenshot:
Given that you are not using an external monitor, it would work on the laptop monitor on resolution 1024×768. The function shown in the screenshot is really the only function that I want from Beryl, and knowing that ATI doesn’t work very well with Beryl/Compiz anyway, don’t think there is much I can do to make it work on 1280×1024 unless new drivers come on or with another graphics card.
正是做功夫時節
April 9, 2007 5:21 pm佛十號
April 6, 2007 11:56 am菩薩現身
April 5, 2007 8:44 pmGoogle Earth on Linux (ubuntu)
April 4, 2007 11:04 pmAfter a discussion on a bug in the Xorg and ATI graphics card, I installed Google Earth to check that my graphics card is actually functioning correctly. My graphics card is the RADEON Mobility 9000 with the following Xorg.0.log:
(II) RADEON(0): [agp] GART texture map handle = 0xb0302000
(II) RADEON(0): [agp] GART Texture map mapped at 0xb51da000
(II) RADEON(0): Using 8 MB GART aperture
(II) RADEON(0): Using 5 MB for GART textures
(II) RADEON(0): [drm] Initialized kernel GART heap manager, 5111808
The driver that I’m using is ATI and not FGLRX, also direct rendering is not supported either. Anyway I followed this guide to install Google Earth, which is quite simple and it works fine right from the installation without any changes to the settings. The installation basically just consists of 3 comments:
wget http://dl.google.com/earth/GE4/GoogleEarthLinux.bin
chmod +x GoogleEarthLinux.bin
./GoogleEarthLinux.bin
If everything goes well, you can run Google Earth from your menu under Applications > Internet. Here is a screen shot of Google Earth running, click on the image for more screenshots.
Optimising my Laptop - Ubuntu Feisty
April 3, 2007 7:43 pmBefore really getting into my final year project and revision for exams. I spent some time ugrading my 3+ years old laptop (Toshiba Tecra-S1) from Ubuntu 6.10 to 7.04 and optimising it. At the same time cleaned up my desk to have more space to work.
I have trying many different ways of optimising it with online resources including some websites and forums. Here are the changes or applications that I have installed that I felt have increased the performance dramatically.
- Upgrading to Xorg 7.2 beta (follow link for detials)
- Added all the respositories on this page and perform a update + upgrade
- Installed the windows manager E17, see below for details
Also tried out a windows manager called Enlightenment (E17), the installation was quite simple, updated some repos and did a apt-get install. Then just log out and change the session and everything works already. I have to say it looks very nice with many special effects, however after using it for a while (10 mins) I find that I prefer the normal gnome. The effects are just too much for me, but it’s quite impressive that it’s very fast with all these eye-candle enable. After I decided to go back to the normal gnome, I find that applications switching and menu loading are a lot faster. Not sure excatly why that is, possibly because some softwares and core has been updated.
Anyway I’m quite happy that everything is working fine now on this laptop and it doesn’t feel slow at all! It doesn’t take much time to load any application, if I don’t run any heavy program or applications, don’t think its responses is any slower than a new desktop. It’s amazing how Linux makes this possible, but at the same time I do feel that Linux is getting way too user friendly, a bit like windows!
