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.

Downgrading from 13.04 to 12.10?

Generally, 13.04 is fine for my nVIDIA desktop, but on my HP laptop, I'm very unhappy with it.  The lack of a dual head setup is seriously killing me (Thank you, AMD...) and after the recent updates, my touchpad click button is now playing tricks on me.  What do I do?  Do I downgrade to 12.10?  Will the next Ubuntu release fix all of these issues?  Hmmm...

I intentionally upgraded my PC first and give 13.04 a week on that machine to make sure everything was spiffy.  This grace period was for me to decide whether or not to upgrade my work laptop.  I see now that I should probably not be upgrade happy with my work laptop but that will mean I will get stuck with the same problem I had before, which is getting stuck on old releases forever.

It's been a rough week...

Unsurprising Failure of being with AMD

Today, I upgraded my HP Pavilion G4-2123TX from 12.10 to 13.04.  I was very leery of the AMD hardware and I expected problems.  Well, I got them alright!

First off, the AMD drivers bombed HARD.  No amount of reinstall and reconfigure would help.  I would two helpful links that helped me get through this (here and here).  It is annoying to see AMD hardware fail so hard at simply working but such is the life of AMD owners.

Next problem was the wifi.  No matter what I did, I could not get my wifi to work with my security even though everything worked perfectly fine on the old 12.10 install.  I changed my security to WPA/TKIP from WPA2/AES and that seemed to help quite a bit (which messed with the wifi connectivity of my phone.  Ah, c'est la vie.)

Lastly, dual monitor is broken in my laptop.  Broken.  Bad.  Still no solution in sight yet.

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.

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...

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!

Prepping for War

I had asked around for other laptops I could get without the wretched Microsoft Tax and they are: HP G4-2123TX and G4-2129TX.  Overall, the specifications look good except for the fact that they use AMD Radeon cards, which I have vowed never to ever buy again, and that Ubuntu support is rather mysterious.

To me, it looks like the Lenovo G480 has comparable specs to the G4-2123TX laptop but looks and sounds like it'll work better.  The nVIDIA graphics chip is also a neat bonus on top of it.  So, I've begun digging up as much as I can over its hardware compatibility woes.  The only one I've seen is the lack of the alx driver for the network interface card.  Here are the additional details on the issue and the solution from the Ubuntu launchpad ticket.