I am in the process of converting my office from a Win XP environment to a Ubuntu 12.04 environment. My hp-compaq dx2250M with Dell 2410 monitor (1920 x 1200 in portrait mode) has been an unexpected problem. It has always worked with Win XP (and upgrades). I added a second HDD and did a clean install with Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit. OS installed, but video freezes often with mouse movement or loading a complex web page such as LinuxQuestions, but machine does not fully lockup (for example, VLC media player is still running on an Internet streaming radio site. I am using anothre PC to write this). I have posted question on Ubuntuforums, but only one reply asking for more info and similar questions not answered. When video freezes only option is turn off PC and reboot. Sometimes when it reboots it will give TTY login instead of unity desktop. Several times wehn I have not been at PC, I comeback to TTY screen showing that there has been a kernel panic. Ubuntu 12.04 loaded nonproprietary ATI/Radeon drivers. The graphics "card" is built into the motherboard. I have attached printout from System Profiler and Benchmark. I tried loading proprietary drivers from AMD web site, but they will not install with 12.04.

Is there a solution or work-around to this problem?

Thank you,

John

Attached Files

hardinfo.pdf (94.0 KB, 57 views)

Hi, the ati graphics module is called radeon,
it's in the pdf list you provided. (so, it's loaded)

If the card was working fine with winxp (memory/rendering/speed!!)

then I would not check the bios for onboard-graphics memory settings.

It may be an X (xorg) error.... But you mention kernel panics,

When this occurs to my machine I generally repair by reinstalling the kernel package.

Generally, I upgrade it to the newest stable version from the repos.

I suggest you do that first.

you need kernel-dev package and dependants to install from ati, it gives much better performance when working.

Cheers, Glenn

A big thank you to GlennsPref for the prompt assistance. The problem was in the BIOS settings. Indeed, I am surprised the XP worked with the recommended BIOS settings. Big problem was that the BIOS was not set for onboard VGA. Another problem was that the UMA frame buffer size was set to 128 MB when 32 MB works.

I am writing this from the "affected PC". Since making those changes the PC has been stable except for occassioanlly coming up as TTY1 after a reboot instead of the unity desktop.

All upudates and upgrades have been made that have come up with Update Manager.

John.

Good that it works for you now. Just to answer the question about the correct driver, the free radeon driver (which is installed by default) is the only driver you can use with this card on modern Linux systems. ATI declared cards from that generation deprecated long time ago and doesn't support them anymore, not even with legacy drivers.

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