Catalyst beta drivers update

Hell yeah!  AMD's 13.2 beta 6 drivers work.  Finally!

Finally some answers...

I've been, on occasion, scouring the net for answers on my AMD hardware on Ubuntu.  Support has been incredibly awful but I wasn't surprised.

lspci describes my hardware as: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Thames XT/GL [Radeon HD 7600M Series]

This provided me with an interesting article that seems to explain a possible solution to this problem.  Essentially, it looks like you need to install the latest beta driver from AMD to get things pseudo working.  Specifically, the post mentions that the 13.2 Beta 3 version works on the laptop.  Ubuntu distributes the 12.6 Catalyst which is virtually unusable here.

One has to wonder when Ubuntu plans to put the aforementioned driver in the repository.

Update:
An additional article that discusses this on Ubuntu.

Here is the launchpad link for Ubuntu's fglrx stuff.

VIM tip

Coding using vim?  Once the syntax highlighting goes bonkers, type in... :e

Ubuntu 12.10 and FGLRX

Regarding the AMD crap driver on Ubuntu, this write up seems like a good one to keep handy on this blog.  I am going to wait for some dkms deb packages to arrive because there's no way I'm doing those custom driver installs now.  Still, the article is a good resource to have.

HP Pavilion G4-2123TX and the Realtek Card Reader Update

So, I saw a kernel update come in today from Ubuntu and I noticed that the rts5229 module wasn't being loaded.  I checked the driver being used and its: rtsx_pci.  I uninstalled the rts5229-dkms deb package and tried my SD card reader and Ubuntu loads it up without issues.  So I'm lead to believe that the new kernel update includes the drivers for these.  Good job, Canonical.

My current kernel is linux-image-3.5.0-24-generic.

Some thoughts...

Next time you install graphics drivers, check with the manufacturer's website before grabbing the driver directly from nVIDIA or AMD.

Saints Row The Third is insane!

Updating Vista...

Vista has been utterly slow and it's taking days to update it.  This just references the issue I had with installing SP1.  It first won't show up in the Windows Update but apparently it's a matter of installing all the updates it needs.  When it did show up on Windows Update, it kept trying to install and it wasn't happening.  This article helped out.  I downloaded SP1 and SP2 from the article and am going through installing them via safe mode (F8 on startup).

It works!

The dkms deb package from the previous post works... or so it seems!  This is good!

More on the Card Reader

This blog post managed to explain much of the situation.  I also may try his kernel module deb package to see if it works.

HP Pavilion G4-2123TX and the Realtek Card Reader

So, it looks like I found a missing driver on Ubuntu 12.10 for the Realtek card reader that came with my new laptop.  lspci identifies the device as Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5229 PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01).

Apparently there are quite a few bug tickets (here and here) that talk about that.  Furthermore, it looks like Realtek has already released the drivers and one forum thread discusses how to install it.  Apparently even linux-next has the drivers already.  So when is this support finally coming??

I know how to compile drivers, but I ain't doing it.  It's a headache considering that Ubuntu keeps changing drivers and I have to recompile them to make them work.  No thank you.  Maybe it's about time I read up how dkms works though...

Plan B

Over all, I'm not particularly worried about the data on my laptop.  Gotta say, it makes playing around with it easier.  Fiddling around with the letters didn't work so now I'm reading up this blog post to set the Acer Recovery partition as active.  Let's see how it goes.

Goodbye Gutsy... or not.

Sometimes, when you're tired, you do something really, really dumb.  So I decided to clean out the Linux partition on my old Acer laptop.  I had also discovered that the DVD drive can't read anything and the Acer recovery partition is throwing a fit on me by complaining about the dreaded missing GUI (*.WSI) files and it was giving me the error reason 0xa0000001.  Before it had dawned upon me too, I had made GRUB totally useless by purging the Linux partition (Way to go, idiot!).

To boot up my Windows Vista partition, I downloaded unetbootin and setup my 1 GB usb stick with Super Grub Disk.  Allow unetbootin to install the SGD because SGD2 doesn't work with it.

From SGD, the first thing I tried is to fix the Windows boot which would effectively kill GRUB on the mbr, but this did not work.  Using the Boot & Tools menu got me to select Boot Partition and start up my old Vista install.  At least I got to boot it!  Now to make my recovery partition work!

For resource, I'm going with this forum thread.  This reminded me that the way the partitions where setup when I got them was that I had an C: partition with the label ACER and a D: partition with the label DATA.  Since all the drive letters were mucked up badly, and Acer doesn't do a good job to make their recovery routines robust, I think I'll try to get my laptop partitions setup to resemble the way it did back when it was new.  Hopefully then I get finally get the factory reset stuff to work.

Annoying stuff on my HP laptop

First of all, the dual head stuff with the radeon driver is just crap.  One time, it went to hell and dropped my resolution to like 640x480 except it was all in a corner of the screen.  Second time it went crazy, the settings auto-reverted to mirror mode.  Dumb stuff.

Wifi isn't as good as I hoped it would be.  After a while, it would stop seeing my router and connect to a different hot spot.  I have to perform QPC on my router to make it connect again.  ARG!