Random Thoughts

It's been a while since I've posted so this is an amalgamation of things that have been happening.  First of all, I now have a MacBook Air and the adjustment has been minimal.  All my Linux desktops have sort of been modified to have a quasi-OSX like setup with the arrangement of the close, minimize, maximize buttons.  At worst case, the terminal gives me back that Linux touch and gives me a lot of power back when OSX's UI fails me.

I love the touchpad gestures.  It's probably the most unique aspect of OSX.  Taking the cool computing ideas from Linux and giving it that Apple take on things gives me a good perspective on what can be done to make desktop computing more efficient.  That being said, I just really don't like the regressions that happened.

Getting my PS/2 keyboard with the USB converter to get recognized in OSX is mindbogglingly difficult.  I scoured multiple websites screaming at me the words: "No, it doesn't work." But I refused to believe.  It turns out that the solution is to turn off my MacBook and plug the keyboard in while the device is turned off.  Why?  I don't know.  If the keyboard is supported, why on earth would you want to make it harder to support such devices?

The USB ports are way too few and the Mini DisplayPort (Thunderbolt) really blows here.  Suddenly, I can't use the extra monitor sitting here and I have to buy some fangled adapter to get it going (It's on the way...).  Lastly, the SSD drive is way too small, but that's to be expected.

Despite all of this, I am at peace with the Mac.  It's a nice device and gives me more experience as far as using other computing environments.  All that being said though, my next laptop will definitely go back to Linux.

Next stop, I reformatted my HP laptop that was running Linux Mint.  To be honest, I had been very disappointed with Linux Mint's performance here.  By the time I reformatted it, it had slowed down to a crawl on boot and on GDM login.  It has never ever happened before in any Linux desktop I've used and I have gone through quite a bit.  I tried to analyze the boot sequence and the GDM login process but to no avail.  It was just pitiful to see Linux perform this bad.

I installed Linux Mint 17.3 and that was a mindboggling choice.  The boot was as bad as when I had the bloated Linux Mint 17.1 install.  I was willing to forego that to see what the desktop had in favour.  Secretly, I hoped it would just simply disappear.  When I setup fglrx, I noticed that running amdconfig wouldn't detect any proper supported GPU (Mine is Radeon HD 7670M) which prompted me to look for the xorg version.

Linux Mint 17.3 runs on xorg 1.17.1 which seems to be .1 version above the latest fglrx version from AMD's site.  So I figured I should just ditch this.  I went back and reinstalled Linux Mint 17.1 on the HP Laptop.  I also installed fglrx and not fglrx-updates (which didn't work the last time I tried it).  After running amdconfig, I am treated with the same error which boggled my mind.  I checked xorg and the version was 1.15.  So, NOW, I'm really confused!

I rebooted anyway and fglrx seemed to load right.  I installed cairo-dock and the rest of my usual setup and everything seems set.  For some reason, Linux Mint 17.1 boots up faster than Linux Mint 17.3.  As long as it doesn't bog down, I can live with this.

Speaking of fglrx, I was also reading up if amdgpu and amdgpu-pro will have support on my Radeon GPU.  I think 7670M is still Southern Islands and that support 'should' be coming in the future.  Cross fingers!

FGLRX Issues and Linux Mint

After installing Linux Mint 17.1 on my HP laptop, I noticed that the fglrx-updates package doesn't detect my AMD display drivers.  That's very disappointing but there's no release notes for the Catalyst driver yet (15.3?).  So, I'm not certain if AMD is supposed to drop support for the 7xxM series.  To install fglrx, I had to use the regular fglrx release from Linux Mint.

Then, of course, the Ubuntu fglrx issue dual monitor hit me hard with the flickering desktop.  Sheesh.  From my additional research however, I've found this blurb from the Arch Linux article.

When using a PowerXpress laptop in AMD-only mode (ie, setting the discrete card to render everything) you sometimes run into issues with artifacting/duplicating between displays. This is a known issue, and seems to effect 7xxxM series cards.
The artifacting disappears when you transform one of the monitors by either rotating or scaling. So you can use xrandr to fix this

So, I used the xrandr command they supplied and massaged it to my own case and came up with this:

xrandr --output LVDS1 --primary --mode 1366x768 --pos 0x0 --scale 1.0001x1.0001 --output VGA1 --right-of LVDS1 --scale 1x1 --mode 1024x768

This is not quite what I was hoping for as the second screen seems to display one half of my first monitor display.  After playing around with xrandr, I found the command that would fix it here.

xrandr --output LVDS1 --primary --mode 1366x768 --pos 0x0 --output VGA1 --right-of LVDS1 --scale 1.0001x1.0001 --mode 1024x768

The other caveat on Linux Mint seems to be the installation of the bcm4313 drivers, but that's easy to resolve.

Open Source Radeon Drivers and Power Management

Just a quick note here.  I switched to the open source drivers for the multiple monitors but along with that, my battery life had been slashed by one half.  I used to get approximately 4 hours of life from the fglrx driver and now I have barely 2 hours.  Sad, but the big desktop is more important to me at the moment.

Done! Goodbye fglrx!

In short, I've given up on AMD's drivers.  I waited as long as I could but there is just no improvement.  The notes here details on how I got rid of the fglrx and switched to open source.

Basically, I followed the instructions from this article for removing.  I did not however perform the steps to reinstall the open source drivers from there.  I ran the software sources application and clicked on the open source drivers, applying the changes and letting it reinstall the packages.  Then, I deleted xorg.conf and rebooted.

Voila!  Multiple monitors are back!

I'm ditching fglrx

After months and months of using this piece of sh*t driver.  I've decided that when I do get a bulk of time to sort this out.  I'm going to switch back to the open source drivers.  Having a big desktop is more important than the power saving stupidity I'll suffer from with the open source radeon drivers.

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.

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!

Setting up my new laptop...

I bought the HP Pavilion G4-2123TX and so far, it's been great.  Most of the hardware seem to work out of the box.  The only sticking point thus far has been AMD which continues to be an absolute failure of a company in the Linux world.  I half-expected AMD graphics drivers to suck on Linux, but had hoped that Valve's Linux push would mean decent fglrx releases.  I was wrong.  So wrong.

When I installed my Ubuntu 12.10 on my desktop running nVIDIA hardware, the process was relatively painless.  There's a few hoops for sure, but everything worked fine afterwards.  Well, AMD is a truly a POS when it comes to Linux support.  I've tried to install the kernel headers, and configured their fglrx drivers repeatedly and it only produced issues.  Way to go Ubuntu and AMD.  It's apparently a known issue, and one that hasn't been solved until now.  Seriously.