Listmates, One shortcoming that really irks me (and a whole lot of other laptop users) is the lack of an ATI driver for the meager hardware on most laptops. I don't know what the statistics are, but just from an educated guess standpoint, I bet that 50-65% of the current (in use and less than 3 years old) graphic adapters in laptops is ATI. (either Xpress or mobility Radeon chips). The difference in performace between using the radeonhd driver and the fglrx driver is 6-fold, only made that much worse by kde4 demands on the graphic subsystem. I don't know if there is any political/developer will for this, but for a majority of the ati laptop hardware out there (and desktop for that matter), we have the fglrx driver that is now static as of the 9-3 (version 8.953) release of the "legacy" driver with ATI abandoning driver support for all pre 2400 series cards. In the past, the main reason for not supporting the ATI driver (not just Arch) was that it was too much of a moving target, requiring considerable work on the distros part to keep up with library changes, etc. Now with the driver static, I wonder if it might not be worth looking into to see if it is even feasable to try and make it work with the current arch setup. ( I know I'm not smart enough in this area to be of any use. ) The reason I bring this up I running arch on one drive I have for my laptop, and I'm limited to the radeonhd driver. It's getting better, but it has two achiles heels: (1) performance, and (2) heat (lots of it). Ultimately, the radeonhd driver will crack the black box and have a great driver, but currently, the combination of the issues is bad enough, I keep an old copy of suse 11 on another driver for use in my laptop, for no other reason than it has the working fglrx driver and I can work with my laptop without the fan noise and heat under my left palm caused by the lack of downclocking/powerdown of the unused gpu circuitry experienced with the radeonhd driver. I don't know if it is even worth looking into, but I do know that for laptop users, if Arch had a working fglrx driver, that would be one key point a lot of laptop users would be willing to switch for. Just a stray thought, so take it for what its worth. As for the current, still maintained, ATI driver for 2400+ series cards, good luck, it's still moving pretty fast.... -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com
