[Ubuntu-ZW] Can someone please help me fix problem with ATI Radeon HD 4570 graphics card

[Kalpesh Thaker]

Honestly....i think the blame is shared between ATI and ASUS in this case.

The problem with OEMs is very simple, end of the day, its all about the
money.

ATI designs a chipset..sells it on to the OEM.

The OEM looks at the chipset that will bring them the most profit....and
since ATI's are much cheaper
than Nvidia, that automatically translates into profit. Especially if you
keep your cost premiums to the lowest
possible.

Now, OEM's such as ASUS, have 'deals' with microsoft. Hence why every laptop
you buy, automatically
comes with windows preloaded. So if the laptop works in windows, and doesnt
exhibit problems.... then the
laptop is perfect, and will be sold! End of the day OEM's dont care that
linux doesnt run on their hardware...
because it works in windows, besides...once you pay for the laptop, its a
done deal.. ASUS have got their money
from you...thats all they wanted...and their only objective is accomplished
once your receipt is printed.

It is worth nothing, that in no part of the production, is the end user ever
considered, except for the R&D/Marketing
department (who make their products flashy enough for you to consider
buying), and thats all.

This is the realistic truth. they dont care if an onboard modem wont work in
ubuntu, because if you read the
sticker that came on the laptop, it was "designed for windows xp/vista/7".
When you buy a laptop, it is guaranteed
to perform with the OS that it comes pre-loaded with. Anything over or under
that.. is considered "out of specification"
and no one will assume responsibility for whatever problems you encounter.

Honestly, the pressure needs to rather be shifted to ATI, who end of the
day, have designed the chipsets, and
CAN create a working driver/platform which is compatible across multiple
OS's... But they choose not to...or rather pass the
buck onto the OEM... who then passes it back to the manufacturer. In most
cases... they produce a generic "proprietary"
driver for linux, that provides the bare minimum functionality for that
particular hardware.

All ASUS really do, is buy a whole lot of components from tom, dick and
harry....solder them together, make a nice looking
case for it... then put it on the shelf for sale.

It really is a chicken or the egg situation..

i have had endless arguments with Dell and HP South Africa a few years
back...on why their hardware wont run
linux properly. Believe me, this is a war that "we" cannot win. The market
share for pre-loaded open source based
computer hardware is just a joke compared to the sales of pc's loaded with
windows.

This is the same story with onboard "soft" modems, sound cards, network
cards, etc etc.


On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 12:35 PM, Gyron Mkwebo <gyron at powerspeed.co.zw>wrote:

> Trawling the internet for a fix, I found this interesting 'rant':
>
> It is NOT ubuntu’s fault neither Linux fault if the user is buying with
> the wrong hardware. Yes, I know, in a perfect world every single
> hardware vendor should support linux out-of-the-box. The awful truth is
> that is not true.
>
> So what must users do? They go and buy whatever they think is nice and
> THEN complain because linux can’t run on it. It will run, you just have
> to wait a little, so the community can have the time to reverse engineer
> the drivers blah blah
>
> But the main thing is that people should START VOTING WITH THE WALLET
>
> ffs get a live cd and BEFORE you buy the laptop try it. If we start
> buying ONLY from vendors that DO support linux then at some point all hw
> vendors will respect the linux community as they should.
>
> I, for example, HAVE NOT BOUGHT a single ATI card since 4 years ago. And
> I tell the same thing to all the people that ask me about buying
> decisions. So ATI is loosing 100 clients (because of me) each year. They
> will fix their proper linux support or they will continue to loose
> clients (not only because of me but because of the buying decisions of
> all the linux community).
>
> SO, VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET . START REACTING! MAKE THE DIFFERENCE and stop
> complainig to canonical.
>
> On Thu, 2010-02-18 at 11:51 +0200, Gyron Mkwebo wrote:
> > Got the laptop, worked on it 20 minutes and it freezes. All i did was
> > open eclipse and firefox, next thing, hard-lockup. Rebooted the cold
> > way, machine gets to desktop and while looking for a network using the
> > network manager, hard lockup.
> > I real miss my HP nx7400. Had absolutely NO issues with all the versions
> > of ubuntu, i have used on it (started with 6.10).
> > I'll try a BIOs update and see how it goes.
> >
> > On Thu, 2010-02-18 at 08:50 +0200, Donald Hobbs wrote:
> > > I fixed your laptop :-)  Its working fine now.
> > > Donald Hobbs
> > >
> > > PhoenixTech
> > >
> > > Cell: +263 912 258159
>
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