Compaq Presario (V2305CA) laptop and Ubuntu

[tmilam]

> The fglrx driver doesn't support the xpress 200m chip anyway.

> Even if it did, I wouldn't be too sure of it. It's absolute crap on
> the

> radeon 9500 in my desktop. It locks up half the time just logging out
> of

> X.



Actually there is an ati driver out specifically for the 200m chipset.
You can get to it by browsing to linux drivers for motherboards on the
ati website. And believe it or not......I got it to run perfectly! It
didn't install on the 2.6.10 kernel but runs fine on 2.6.11. 



Now the one good thing about this is that you can now run it in
1280x768. Unfortunately, it wasn't much of an improvement over VESA.
With the video memory turned down to 64mb in bios I was getting 370FPS
in glxgears. Hardly approaching something worthy of gaming with.....



I started experiencing lock-ups with gnome only after I reinstalled
hoary. All other window managers seemed to work fine. Never figured
that one out......



So why does this thing lock up?? It happens way too commonly. Probably
something to do with power management. 



> For my curiosity, does xvideo work for you? Whenever I tried to play a

> video (or even just launch totem) X would crash.



Honestly I haven't had chance to sit down and test this out yet :D



One other thing I can add for any that are wondering about the v2000z -
hardware that works....



- ati express 200m - works fine with the 200m ati driver



- bluetooth - works great! now if i could just figure out how to
configure a bluetooth mouse in xorg....



- sound no problems here, runs great



- power management - seems fine but i think apic needs to be turned off
with the noapic option



- wireless - works fine but ONLY with 32 bit ubuntu. requires
ndiswrapper. there is no 64 bit windows .inf driver file for this
wireless card.



the only thing that I didn't bother with was the modem. I can't
honestly suggest buying this laptop at this point. It's simply not very
well supported yet and requires alot of work to get everything working
properly! I still am having problems with lock-ups. More on this
later.........It's a very nice laptop, but if you want to run linux on
it (at least at this point) prepare for alot of  ](*,) 



Remember when centrino first came out how much trouble it was to get
linux running on *any* centrino notebook? Well this is kind of like
that. Now centrino works fine under linux. We'll just have to wait



*sigh*


-- 
tmilam