Ever since kernel 3.0 (this may have also been true of the later 2.6 series) I have experienced issues with my video.

VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV710 [Radeon HD 4350]

At boot, the display becomes "garbled" and it is impossible to get to my Linux. I first noticed this with Arch - I had kept off upgrading my kernel and stayed with 2.6.37 (which worked fine.) On upgrade to V 3.0, my problems began.

I discovered that adding "nomodeset" or "acpi=force" to the boot parameters got me to my desktop.

The radeon driver in Arch gave me a blocky black bar when mouse scrolling in any XFCE software. This problem did not occur in Firefox.

My xorg.conf is set to run a second monitor by adding a Virtual desktop 2560 x 1024. This caused no issues with my earlier kernel.

Coincidentally, I wanted to replace my small HDD on this computer so a distro install was needed. I thought I'd give Ubuntu 11.10 a whirl (rather than installing Arch and having the same issues!) The radeon driver (xserver-xorg-video-radeon) only give me 2D performance. I am currently trying the ATI/AMD Catalyst driver. It works but it's not fantastic. When moving windows, the mouse cursor tracks ahead of the window, making precise placement an issue. There is distortion when using some (useless?) tools such as Expo.

I don't mind which distro I use. I am toying with Ubuntu or Arch but I do want good video performance. My needs are not that huge!

Do I stick with the Catalyst driver on Ubuntu (or Arch) and seek some form of parameter changes adjustmentto improve performance? If so, any ideas?

Or do I return to the radeon driver and somehow make it work?

I realise that I could install Arch and use the LTS kernel or install Debian (still running 2.6) but I imagine I will have to confront this issue at some point in time.

Please help.

What do your logs have to say ?


"acpi_osi= "

does the trick for my ATI laptop. Note the space before the end quote. I tried every iteration on acpi I could find, and that is the one that works best.

"acpi_osi= " << where does this go?

edit:
I suppose it goes in grub.

edit:
heck. I really am not thinking straight today.

ceyx : thanks for that but it didn't work. Having read around it, it seemed worth trying.

I decided to cut my losses and throw money at this problem. I bought a 512 MB NVIDIA card for very little money (£24.99) and all is good again. I am going to write my ATI card off as broken.

I was running an ATI HD5450 with kernel 3.X.X a few days ago, no issues here. Using aptosid xfce 64bit, and running the open source drivers. I didnt try the closed drivers, the card didnt run in the machine I wanted it to (thanks to nVidia and/or asus, its a BIOS problem :S)

I'd get over to phoronix.com, as it's the only place you will find ati/amd developers, like the guys who will sort the code.