11.04 on an Asus 1215b?

[Linuxisfast]

How can i remove the ATI drivers and install the open source ones so that suspend works?

Thanks.

If you have installed via hardware drivers, go to the applet and simply de-activate and reboot.

[SickNick]

I also realized that Gnome 3 does not work with the AMD drivers.

This really sucks because I have been using Unity for 6 months now and I can officially say, I don't like it at all. Gnome 3 is way easier to multitask on, and prettier.

Is everyone with an AMD driver having gnome 3 problems?

[lakerssuperman]

I now have a fully update 11.10 install on 1215b. Suspend generally works, however certain times it won't go to sleep and becomes stuck, necessitating me pulling the battery to get it to pop back on. I'm not happy about this, but it works more often than it used to, so hopefully support for this is maturing.

As for battery life, I get 5+ hours of good use out of it, perhaps closer to six depending on the task. It may be capable of more and I would love if it gave me more, but near six hours is a nice place to start before tweaking.

For video I am running VLC 1.1.12 with the latest xvba-video package from the Splitted Desktop website. I am not getting any acceleration on any AMD/ATI hardware I have at this point. This problem doesn't seem confined to AMD hardware either. I did a quick test on my primary desktop which has an NVIDIA 560ti in it and ran VLC with VDPAU-vaapi backend and got high CPU usage there as well.

However, running unstable builds of XBMC with vaapi enabled, I do get acceleration with about 15-20% usage on both cores of my Fusion notebook. One issue I have noticed is that 1080p video is totally corrupted and won't play properly. I only get working sound. Interestingly, the problem seems confined to the Fusion chip as I tried the same setup and video clip on my Radeon 4870 and it played the 1080p file without any issues.

I must say that, aside from some minor issues, I am very pleased with this notebook. 11.10 is worlds better than 11.04 was when I first put it on the my 1215b. Hopefully support continues to improve. AMD drivers have improved, but I really wish they would put more time into them. The Fusion platform is very appealing and the weakest link, unfortunately, is the drivers.

[lakerssuperman]

@SickNick

There is a known issue with the current AMD drivers and Gnome 3.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1865257

I really like AMD for various underdog supporting reasons, but their driver support is just awful on Linux. It has gotten much better, but it is still nowhere near as good as NVIDIA.

[kev94]

Hi lakerssuperman,

Could you tell me exactly how did you get Ubuntu 11.10 running successfully on your 1215b laptop ?
Because I got the same, though I tried to install Ubuntu without success. Didn't get Grub to work properly.

Would the proprietary drivers solve your 1080p video decoding issue ?

[Vaphell]

i had a problem with the 11.04 installation (after install it booted straight to win7 anyway as if there was no ubuntu) and fixed the problem by reinstalling grub from liveusb.
in my case it was:

sudo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt
sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

maybe your issue is similar.

[Linuxisfast]

When you boot into the BIOS to set boot priority order for your CD/DVD drive, make sure to select the entry for your drive and not the UEFI, then make sure to do manual partitioning by creating new partition.

I don't use suspend and hibernate wake up is slow here compared to regular boot, video works fine with vlc and xvba driver with 30% max load for HD vids and HDMI out works good as well.

[lakerssuperman]

As mentioned, make sure you are selecting the boot device and not the UEFI setting in the boot menu. Also, make sure you don't have the USB drive plugged into the USB 3.0 port as it won't boot and load correctly with this port. Using any of the other USB 2.0 ports worked well.

Once you do this, you shouldn't have any other issues installing Ubuntu.

@Linuxisfast

You have VLC working with hardware acceleration? Are you using 11.10 and if so what did you do to get it working? It works fine with XBMC, but on VLC I don't get any acceleration on either of my AMD machines.

[Linuxisfast]

As mentioned, make sure you are selecting the boot device and not the UEFI setting in the boot menu. Also, make sure you don't have the USB drive plugged into the USB 3.0 port as it won't boot and load correctly with this port. Using any of the other USB 2.0 ports worked well.

Once you do this, you shouldn't have any other issues installing Ubuntu.

@Linuxisfast

You have VLC working with hardware acceleration? Are you using 11.10 and if so what did you do to get it working? It works fine with XBMC, but on VLC I don't get any acceleration on either of my AMD machines.

lakesuperman,

In Natty I would have to add catalysthacks ppa for vlc and xvba-va driver from Splitted Desktop, now with Oneiric, all I do is install FLGRX via repo, install vlc and xvba and vainfo shows that hardware acceleration is enabled. Can you post your vainfo results btw?

[lakerssuperman]

Vainfo says that everything checks out and it is running properly, identifying what it can accelerate. It reports that the following modes are supported:
VAProfileH264High
VAProfileVC1Advanced

I just did a test with two clips, both 720p. I ran them with VLC and with XBMC. Under XBMC neither core exceeded 20% usage according to the internal CPU usage analysis. When I windowed XBMC and checked the System Monitor numbers it was in the 20-25% range, which I can understand as the Monitor tends to incur some overhead. Under VLC the same clips were using more between 40-50% of both cores as reported by the System Monitor.

I find it odd that there is so much difference between the two. Perhaps acceleration is working in VLC, just not as efficiently as XBMC and the higher numbers were leading me to believe that it wasn't working at all.