hi there,

after a lot of reading on distrowatch.com , i finally decieded on debian as my choice of linux distro. i will be installing it pretty soon, but before i do i have this some questions. i have used

1. does the X Window System have support for ATI mobility radeon X1300? (cos i had an error when i tried ubuntu live cd, x windows system couldnt start)

2. if i encounter problems on the graphics, what is the work around. i have downloaded the driver from the ATI (AMD) site.

specs

dell insperon E1505
Core 2 duo 2.0Ghz 4MB cache L2
2GB RAM
160GB HDD
ATI mobility radeon X1300
all other godies(blue tooth, wifi,lan,etc)

thanks for reading.

Ally

If you install the driver from ATI it should work just fine.

I doubt if you'll be able to compile the module for ATI's latest driver in Etch since it requires a newer version of libc6. The fglrx driver in Etch (8.28.8, I believe) does support that card, though.

If your only Linux experience is one tryout of the Ubuntu Live CD, you may be in for quite a bumpy ride with Debian.

I have the ATI Radeon X1300 from Dell in a desktop (it is not the ATI mobility). The only way I can get it to work is with the vesa driver.

Given that I trust your observation to some degree, I took a closer look. The Etch driver evidently does not support the Mobility X1300 (you have to move to Lenny for that), but all the Debian drivers claim to support the Radeon X1300.

From personal experience, I know that the fglrx-driver in Lenny (8.38.6-2) reqires the 2.6.22 kernel to compile correctly. As yet that kernel is not available in Lenny which complicates things a bit.

Sid includes the 8.40.4-2 driver for AMD64 and the 8.38.6-2 driver for i386. To the best of my knowledge those drivers are flawless with the current Sid kernel.

Some General Advice regarding ATI fglrx Drivers

I have looked at that also. However when I look at lspci I find the problem, the card is listed as X1300/X1550 and the X1550 is not yet supported by the fglrx driver.

I do have some hope after reading some of the hype AMD has released about the next fglrx drivers.