Lucid drivers for Laptop with ATI Radeon mobility X1600 faulty

[Tiko]

Hi all,

I just updated from ubuntu karmic to lucid, using ATI M56P Radeon Mobility X1600.
When I log into the desktop environments, my windows manager(metacity?) is faulty.
I couldn't get a proper boot log of grub(i think i have ubuntu's log), though i see flashes" of messages less than 0.2 seconds showing some "IRQ" error. The irq error was later replaced with some lines of number in square brackets and messages too fast to read, after i played around in synaptics with the drivers.

Also, not knowing what the "nvidia x server" was (since i'm using ati), I removed it and found out it was essential. Later I installed it back.


In the desktop environment:

First, the mouse cursor stuck at a perpetual "X" indicating busy.

Second, all applications opened, do not have a wrapper, i.e. application window, if there's any, cannot be moved. Hence, all application stack atop one another on the top left screen.

Remedy:
1) Go to, system->preference->appearence -> visual effects tab.
Click on any of the "normal" or "extra", it'll attempt to search for driver. After searching, it'll say "driver cannot be found", and the wrapper of all the applications miraculously came back. Though "appearance effects" cannot be switched on.

2) open terminal. type in "metacity --replace". Same thing appearance effects is gone.


Problem Identification:

The very first release of Karmic, everything works fine for my displays and environments.
If I'm not wrong I was using xorg's or xserver (notice the name is singular, not the combined one) ATI drivers. Later into Dec-Jan, I decided to play around and update my driver through synaptics using the latest xserver-xorg ati driver and the problem surfaced. I downgraded back and it works.

By deduction, I'm pretty sure Lucid's new packages of xserver-xorg drivers has some problems with my hardware compatibility.

I've read that I'm not supposed to use fglrx drivers, and it isn't installed by default. So, it's not related to my issue.

Now i'm usind the xorg-edger's drivers, still no improvement.

I'm not a hardcore geek(in fact I'm very noob), so perhaps I may have missed some cues. This is all that I have observed.

Is anyone facing the same issue? I can provide some logs if anyone can show me directions.
Any help will very much be appreciated.

Thank you very much!

[Tiko]

Ok, I found some other users with similar problem, but different hardware.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1470735

Seems "compiz --replace" works too.
However that doesn't solve the special effects disabled problem.

Anyone familiar with the same problem?

[Tiko]

Some small updates and things I forgot to mention:

I can't find my xconf.d file which according to some threads, is supposed to exist.

When i run compiz i get output that looks like this.

Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
compiz (core) - Fatal: Root visual is not a GL visual
compiz (core) - Error: Failed to manage screen: 0
compiz (core) - Fatal: No manageable screens found on display :0.0

Launching fallback window manager

Something to do with my driver not supporting OpenGL?

[Tiko]

bump

[facelessloser]

hi i had the same problem you are having

i since have put 9.10 back on my machine but it was still the same and then i upgraded to 10.04 again and still nothing

[Tiko]

hi i had the same problem you are having

i since have put 9.10 back on my machine but it was still the same and then i upgraded to 10.04 again and still nothing

I'm guessing you've got one of the later updated packages from the repos of one of the component which breaks the windows manager. Either that, or packages that conflicts with each other.

Are you able to get hold of the very first, karmic release that was 2 days after the official launch to try installing?

I, like any advocate, gave away my ubuntu karmic cd. I'll need to dig for my iso file somewhere. I remember my karmic live cd works, and the effects (wobbly windows ftw) works too.

[Confused Computer User]

Dito here. ATI Radeon X1600 on my desktop (with an asus P4P 800 mother board) and the system is slow as ...

@facelessloser
I ran and still run sometimes 9.10 with no obvious problems or slowdowns. It works the best for me but its support runs out in a year so I want to move on to the new release. Problem is, as stated, 10.04 is not working well with this video card.

I actually went all the way to removing the ATI card and rely on the onboard video memory (and I did pay attention to the bio settings).
This proved itself flawed as well as I ran in other video related issues. Mainly not being able to play video for DVDs (sound works but I get a black screen for the video)

So any feed back from advanced users would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Tiko]

Ok, I got rid of the "IRQ" error. Actually, I managed to see the text when the screen froze and boot up hung. It's a "I/O error" with "sr0 read error" of sorts. Turns out that blank cd-r in my drive is giving part of the quirky problem. Took it out and that msg didn't flash again.

*bump* Could any guru provide some kind of help please?

Thanks~

[Tiko]

Hmm... new observation.
My laptop overheats now, which never happened in Karmic. Though it did when I was using windows.

Flash based players (youtube) cannot be enlarged to full screen mode, firefox will crash.

Some kernel processes seems to hang quite a lot. Unable to shutdown properly.
There always seems to be some program hanging with the status "tty" something.

The slew of issues is hard to pinpoint whether I'm experience failing hardware, driver problem, or other software problem...

*bump*

[Confused Computer User]

Try this, it worked for me.

http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubu...allation_Guide

I tried this on a fresh install of 10.04 and I at least got it out of the slow motion effect and it seems to runs fine. The only issue is that I can't activate the visual effects but otherwise it's a step forward for usability at least.