Hello, I have a Dell Inspiron 7000 with an aging ATI Rage Mobility Pro. As far as I know the stock XFree does not support 3D accelleration for the ATI Mobility range. However those nice people over at RetinalBurn (http://www.retinalburn.net/linux/dri_xv.html) are working on this and it can be used on a binary XFree and a binary kernel proividing the source is available to build it kernel module. The hope is to integrate this into the kernel and XFree but heaven only knows when this might occur. I use it and it is superb. Any one with an older Rage / Rage Pro / Rage 128 / Rage Mobility could do worse than investigate if their card is supported.
By the way, only with the release of kernel-2.4.21 has suspend and standby worked at all on my Dell (still no good on my Acer :-( ). The 7000 is too old for ACPI but APM works brilliantly now. The battery meter works fine on the 7000, but again I can't use ACPI. Owen On Tuesday 05 Aug 2003 7:49 pm, Adrian Rodriguez wrote: > Hi. I've been using mandrake on laptops for a while now but every release > there's always something i have to research online before i get it to > work... > > Case 1: My Dell Inspiron 4000. > I've only been using mandrake on this guy since 9.1 came out. I went > through the install and in the end i looked at the lilo config dialog and > everything looked ok. So i started the laptop and i didn't get any battery > readings :( so ACPI wasn't working for this laptop. I don't know if its a > hardware issue?? So i uninstalled ACPI and modified the lilo config and > next time the computer was turned on i had battery readings with APM. So > I'm happy with that but someone new to linux would never know how to do > this. I'm still downloading cooker isos so i will test to see if things > have changed.... but just in case someone else has an inspiron 4000, have > you guys tested? Another thing that my girlfriend complained about was how > there were so many games installed but alot of them weren't playable. She > wanted to play tux racer and it was just really slow. I don't know if > there's just now acceleration for the detected video card or the config is > messed up. The detected card was: > Description: Rage Mobility M3 AGP 2x > Module: Card: ATI Rage 128 Mobility > That's it for the issues on this laptop. > > Case 2: Dell inspiron 8100 > I've been using mandrake on this guy since 8.2. After 8.2 everything was > ok except battery meters again. Using ACPI never did anything. I kept > check my logs and it kept saying something like "trying to allocate 0 > bytes..." for acpid. So i gave up on that and tried apm... i managed to > get it somewhat working. I was able to press Fn+F3 and go to the BIOS > screen that reads the batteries but when i hit escape to come back to X the > clock was wrong. everything else on that laptop works great including the > radeon 7500. My girlfriend is very new to Linux and when the laptop is > connected to the powercord she is very happy with it. She likes KDE alot > more than her WinXP. The only thing that bothers her is that when she takes > it to work or class and its running on battery she can't tell how much time > she has left. > I've done research on this problem and I can't figure it out. Does anyone > know what the problem is? I think this issue really needs to get cleared > up because a battery meter is very important. I have a friend with the > same laptop and he just gave up... sad... but I can't blame him because > he's always on the run... so he swaps batteries in and out... but 9.1 that > he had on there never worked.
