[CALUG] ATI Radeon 2100-based graphics - driver or alternative video card?

[Bryan J. Smith]

The AMD 740G is a 55nm die shrink from the 80nm 690G, and little changes on the
IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) side of things.  It's the same X1250-HD2100
design.

There is bad news, good news and then more bad news that can be mitigated.

The bad news is that AMD stopped supporting this driver in the proprietary 
driver.
There are always endless OEM changes with IGPs, and I'm sure AMD tired of it.
I've seen my share with the nForce/GeForce Go/M/etc... series on notebooks over
the years, although nVidia does its best to deal with vendor nuiances, and I 
would
argue they do a far, far better job than on Windows.  I.e., my Gateway P-7811FX
has issues with the generic nForce/GeForce 9M series Windows drivers, requires
the Gateway-specific ones, but the generic nVidia Linux drivers update just 
fine.

The good news is that the 690G/740G has full support in the open source world,
including 3D, and advanced feature-framebuffer support.  I have a refurbished
Gateway LT-3101u myself (bought almost a year ago for $200), the earlier
AMD 740G + 1.2GHz combination that kicks the newer Intel chipset + Core Solo
Gateway option in 3D performance and other things (power is about the same,
the 55nm 740G doesn't suck down much juice).  Distributions over the last few
years have the support, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc...  The newer distros even have more
advanced support for the IGP.

So the additional bad news, which can be mitigated, is that newer Kernel Mode 
Setting
(KMS) framebuffer doesn't handle these AMD-ATI IGPs well.  There are some 
firmware-
init issues before the Linux kernel starts that seems to set them up wrong.  The 
solution
is to disable KMS, which causes the init to fall back to VESA modes for just the 
boot
portion (nice logo screen for init).  Once X starts, its the fully accelerated 
driver.

One of these two boot time o
 




----- Original Message ----
From: Ed Browne <edward_d_browne at yahoo.com>
To: calug at unknownlamer.org
Sent: Mon, July 26, 2010 12:08:23 PM
Subject: [CALUG] ATI Radeon 2100-based graphics - driver or alternative video 
card?

I have unfortunately an AMD 740G MoBo with integrated ATI Radeon 
2100-based graphics.  It worked fine with Ubuntu 8.04, and pretty
well with 9.04, but not at all with 10.04.  According to all I've found 
on the web, I tried de-installing the drivers that came with the distro,
and using the proprietary one provided by AMD.  I think it was never
going to work, because it seems they've discontinued support for
any distro beyond February 2009 - and in fact the install fails with
a cryptic error about a version:

Error: ./default_policy.sh does not support version
default:v2:i686:lib::none:2.6.32-23-generic; make sure that the version 
is being correctly set by --iscurrentdistro


Anyway, just to check - is there in fact anyway to operate this
graphics chipset with Ubuntu 10.04?  If not, can anyone recommend
a cheap PCI-e video card that might be supportable for longer than
the <2yrs I got out of this one?

Thanks very much - Ed 


      


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