brucew
June 15th, 2016, 01:37 AM
I have a vintage 2007 or 2008 Asus M4A78E motherboard with integrated ATI Radeon HD 3300 GPU. Specs here (https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M4A78E/specifications/).
I’ve read all the recommended materials and cautions on using ATI with 16.04. They all seem to pertain to the fglrx drivers. I don’t use—and never have used—the proprietary fglrx drivers.
I stick with the plain vanilla—whatever the distro installs by default—since I’m not a gamer and my most demanding video application is SMPlayer playing h.264 videos at 1920x1080 and 30fps. However, I do run dual monitors having a combined resolution of 3840x1200.
Since I could find no warnings against the vanilla driver—except for gaming, modeling and other demanding applications using advanced features that I don't think my GPU supports anyway—I went about installing Xenial. I always do a clean install; repartition and reformat the drives. Never an in-place upgrade. Nothing carries over from the previous install.
The left monitor, plugged into the old-school VGA, works perfectly.
The right monitor, plugged into the DVI, is funky. I haven’t been able to nail down a pattern. It will jiggle the display left and right a couple of times for a distance of about a half-character judging from the menu bar. It will also blank the display for about two seconds, then it lights up again. Sometimes it will be stable for a half-hour or more. Other times it's acting up nearly continuously.
I’m prepared to revert to 14.04 LTS, but before I do, is there anything I should try first?
I’ve read all the recommended materials and cautions on using ATI with 16.04. They all seem to pertain to the fglrx drivers. I don’t use—and never have used—the proprietary fglrx drivers.
I stick with the plain vanilla—whatever the distro installs by default—since I’m not a gamer and my most demanding video application is SMPlayer playing h.264 videos at 1920x1080 and 30fps. However, I do run dual monitors having a combined resolution of 3840x1200.
Since I could find no warnings against the vanilla driver—except for gaming, modeling and other demanding applications using advanced features that I don't think my GPU supports anyway—I went about installing Xenial. I always do a clean install; repartition and reformat the drives. Never an in-place upgrade. Nothing carries over from the previous install.
The left monitor, plugged into the old-school VGA, works perfectly.
The right monitor, plugged into the DVI, is funky. I haven’t been able to nail down a pattern. It will jiggle the display left and right a couple of times for a distance of about a half-character judging from the menu bar. It will also blank the display for about two seconds, then it lights up again. Sometimes it will be stable for a half-hour or more. Other times it's acting up nearly continuously.
I’m prepared to revert to 14.04 LTS, but before I do, is there anything I should try first?