Ubuntu On Sony Vaio FW Series

2 days ago was released new ATI Catalyst™ 8.12. Well I’m not so fast about news =) Let’s test it.

I’m using fglrx driver now and have enabled Compiz. I’m not using smooth scrolling in Firefox but found that default Firefox scrolling is lagging in Compiz. Here is a little solution.

If you have XGL installed (xserver-xgl), go and remove it, it lags even more. Then open your xorg.conf for editing. Alt+F2 and type gksu gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Find this line in device section Driver "fglrx", after this line put new lines:
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"

I have other lines too, that can help in video rendering:
Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "on"

Save file and then logout and login back (restart xorg server). That should help.

I have Mobility Radeon HD 3470 on my FW11ER laptop.

I’m on Ubuntu Intrepid alpha 4 now and while there is new X server, the official drivers from Ati desn’t work (this bug is already reported).

I have luck with installing radeonhd video driver, but it still have no 3D acceleration support with 2D at the same time, but for my work it’s just fine. Anyway it’s better than “ati” driver used by default in Intrepid. You need to compile version from git repository because 1.2.1 is not working, there is a bug with display detection.

You need this packages installed to be able compile it: build-essential, autoconf, autogen, automake, automake1.7, autotools-dev, xorg-dev, x11proto-dri2-dev, x11proto-xf86dri-dev, xserver-xorg-dev, mesa-common-dev and maybe some more =)

There is a guide about compilling and installation of radeonhd on x.org wiki.

Once you checkout git repository, the guide says that you need to configure before compiling with this command: ./autogen.sh, but for Ubuntu you need do it like this:
./autogen.sh --prefix /usr --libdir /usr/lib
make
sudo make install


Thats all at the moment, video is working.

UPD: The list of developer packaged needed before compiling:
libdrm-dev
libgl1-mesa-dev
libgl1-mesa-dri
x11proto-gl-dev
x11proto-xf86dri-dev
xserver-xorg-dev
autotools-dev
xorg-dev
libtool
automake
autoconf
pciutils-dev
libz-dev
zlib1-dev