11.10 Oneiric (AMD 64) AMD E-450, ATI HD 6320 AMD Catalyst 11.8

[collisionystm]

Just ran live CD of 12.04 daily.

Did not have to do anything special. The system booted up without any user input and had the correct screen resolution! It is working great...

No more black screens..Things are looking up!

Radeon HD 6380G

[andersetzerodt]

Hi! I'm thinking about buying an Asus 1225b (E450 with Radeon HD 6320) and I have read most of this thread to get an overview. My worries are whether 12.04 solves the problems some of you stated were present in 11.10 (screen resolution, lagging desktop experience and other stuff related to the graphics.

To be more specific:

1. Would you consider this laptop a good buy, if I intend only to be running 12.04 on it? No Windows 7 and I don't care if I have to use Catalyst drivers (although open source drivers are preferred).

2. If some of you have tried 12.04 on similar laptops (preferably with 12.04), what can you tell about battery life? Is it 6+ hours or way worse than on Windows?

[collisionystm]

12.04 SHOULD be okay with your card.

However that laptop is only an 11 .6 inch screen? Thats tiny...

[moteprime]

I don't know if there are any hardware in the 1225b that will give you any trouble, wifi, usb or sound things. But what the E-450 and graphics concerns you should be in the clear, it works fine now. My Lenovo s205 are also an 11.6" and think the size are perfect for my needs. As for the battery life in 11.12 it's not as good in Ubuntu as in windows, Ubuntu uses the battery at least at double speed compared to windows. (i haven't done anything to get it better, it's mostly just plugged in).

[moteprime]

Hi all.
AMD have released a Catalyst 12.2, it's not on the support site yet, for some reason, but i found it here:
http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/am...x86.x86_64.run

[gsilves30]

I just installed the drivers off of the AMD site. Their find a driver seems to work now for me. I saw E450 and was able to find the new 3/7 released 12.2 Catalyst driver. The instructions https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI worked and there were no broken dependencies.

The install went fine. After the install
- Unity runs lag free.
- I was able to watch a 720p h264, encoded video, some frame drops

For normal use though the laptop is running well enough for me to finally get rid of windows entirely. If anyone has something they would like me to test out with the new ATI proprietary driver let me know I'll give it a spin after work today or maybe at lunch if time permits.

System
HP DM1Z E450 with integrated HD 6320M 4gb Ram 7200RPM drive.

[apoapo]

Okay.. It is working here also. 3d Acceleration is fine with the HD 6320 and the newest 12.2 driver.

BUT: I am not able to watch HD content. Is here anyone who has managed to play a movie without frame drops to 3-10fps?

(xbmc, vlc both failed to play lagg free)

Is it a well known fact that amds linux support is ******?

Thanks for replies.

[gsilves30]

Hi Apoapo,

I think the reason you're not getting HD videos to work is you need LIBVA/VAAPI or else VLC won't use the GPU to decode. Likewise since AMD's drivers are from what I found you also need the XVBA wrapper to get LIBVA to use AMD cards.

Anyhow lets see if my instructions can help. Bear with me I'm not too good at writing how-to guides and this is also after the fact so I may miss something.

If you find something I am missing or want to run a question by me shoot me a PM to hop on IRC or if you have Skype I am nearly always on: greg.silverstein1.

Soooo here it goes !

1) Install AMD/ATI's driver. I think you have this already, if so just double check that it is already doing the open GL acceleration:

gsilvers@DM1FTW:~$ fglrxinfo
display: :0  screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon HD 6320 Graphics
OpenGL version string: 4.2.11554 Compatibility Profile Context

2) Open up synaptic package manager (install it if you don't its a great tool!) and select the following packages to be installed:

libva-tpi1
libva-dev
libva-glx1
libva-x11-1
libva1
vainfo

All of these should show version 1.0.12-2

Hit apply and allow them to install.

Then again in synaptic select to install and apply
xvba-va-driver version 0.7.8ubuntu1.1

3) Now this is something I did not see online but i tried it since I had been messing with video drivers all day to make this work. First modify your environment

gsilvers@DM1FTW:~$ sudo emacs /etc/environment

you want to add the line:
LIBVA_DRIVERS_PATH=/usr/lib/va/drivers

Then I purged out my xorg.conf

cd /etc/X11
sudo RM xorg.conf

4) regenerate xorg.conf and turn on the ATI driver.

gsilvers@DM1FTW:~$ aticonfig --initial -f

5) At this point I restarted so the changes to my environment would take place.
6) After a reboot you should be able to see this:

gsilvers@DM1FTW:~$ vainfo
libva: libva version 0.32.0
Xlib:  extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":0.0".
libva: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva: Trying to open /usr/lib/va/drivers/fglrx_drv_video.so
libva: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA API version: 0.32
vainfo: Driver version: Splitted-Desktop Systems XvBA backend for VA-API - 0.7.8
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileH264High               :    VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Advanced            :    VAEntrypointVLD

This means you are ready to go. At this point, I did not have VLC on my laptop so I installed it using apt-get. Once installed I was able to go into preferences/codecs and enable GPU acceleration. After that I was able to watch

http://www.digital-digest.com/movies...l_Trailer.html

With no issues:


CPU usage is still a little high (45%) with this running but this is a 1.4ghz 17w chip I'm sure that has to do with firefox as well as the fact I think that some of the decoding (deinterlace?) is not done by the GPU.

Let me know how this works for you!

[apoapo]

Hi gsilves30,

thank you very much! Unfortunately this specific board is already on its way to a new owner. But i will have to set up another amd powered device soon.

Your tipps will definitly help me.

As always, community help is GREAT at ubuntu =D>

Cheers!

apoapo

[gsilves30]

Good luck

And agreed community help (and the sense of YESSSS i got this working) is why I primarily use linux/ubuntu. Although I still have a windows partition for gaming.