LOL, I wouldnt go that far. User error, sort of, but you actually tried to do the right thing.

What do you mean by 'awful'? If its tearing this might help-

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...lyst_111&num=1

I don't know what video tearing means. It was just slow. I launched a game called openttd and it animates slowly. Also the mouse pointer doesn't move smoothly over the game window :/ Window Maker animates window minimize and restore actions with simple line drawings, and this makes the cpu usage go skyhigh for a second each time. Also it seems to be very slow playing YouTube videos even with the lowest resolution. I tried different settings. Some were suggested on various forums on the webs, but none of it worked. The driver seems *stable* though as I couldn't produce a crash by switching videos between window/fullscreen or switching between VT and X. That seems to be the way to crash an unstable driver in my experience. If someone has this working better than that with Debian Squeeze I'd be glad to see their xorg.conf.

Hey, what's this? Debian is supposed to be stable...

I will give you my xorg.conf file when I'm back home.

lol I didn't manage to crash the system yet

Thanks! I appreciate the help

OK, thats not good.

I think I know somebody with an ATI AGP 4XXX card. I'll ask if I can borrow it for a few days, and give it a whirl with squeeze.

I take it back all what I said. I only use this computer with AGP HD 4670 for games. Nevertheless, I play games without any window managers, only X. You know, putting "exec <game>" in .xinitrc file and then start the game through startx-command from the console.

However, when I join any windows manager like fluxbox or KDE, I get the same problems as you do. Everything lags, I have problem to scroll through Firefox, mouse lags when opening windows e.t.c..

It is strange, cause I can play for example Quake 4 without any problem, I even use Ultra High on my graphics settings. (Using the open-source driver would not allow me to play Quake 4 without lag issues)

So there seems to be a correlation problem with wm (I think), and that major problem source must be fglrx driver.

fglrx sure is a difficult nut to crack. I got some improvement from the x11 radeon driver by switching to the old style framebuffer console as opposed to using the VGA console or the new framebuffer. Problem now is that XDM shows some distortion. And if I start XDM, then switch to VT and back, it totally freezes. Tried all configuration options for the driver that I suspect might solve it, but nothing of it improves anything. Thank god for the SysRq-S/U/B key combination. Anyway, I'm feeling pretty ready for giving this up before I trash the filesystems. If anyone reads this thinking about buying a Radeon card for Linux, do yourself a favour and buy an Nvidia card.

Unstandable that you dont want to trash the system and are feeling fustrated by the whole experience.

I am unsure if your problems are due to leftover nvidia cruft, or due to the AGP card you are using, or something else that I havent considered yet. If you didnt have the problem of all your computer stuff not being onhand I would suggest rying manually installing the newest ATI/AMD drivers, or even a reinstall.

I've had no problems the few times I've used raedon HD 2XXX-6XXX cards with linux. So far they have all been PCIe versions. I'm probably going to by buying a HD5450 in the next few weeks.

I'm not that impressed with nVidia at the moment. Optimus has been a huge problem for linux users, and nvidia in general are bastards as far as open source development goes. They wont even release the documentation that devs want to help write drivers. I'm also sick of nVidias 'paper upgrades' for the 71.XX drivers...they keep on chuning them out, but its pointless.

It may be the AGP version of the card that is not supported very well. Also it seems R7xx is the newest chip in the HD series?? Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised if it's a new chip. I did have a lousy experience though with a Radeon 9200SE six years ago, except then fglrx was unstable too and kept freezing the system. Slackware 9.1 or 10.x it was.

My experience with the Nvidia proprietary driver and Linux is so far good. Of course, before buying any card check that the driver supports it and google for experiences. Even experiences with Intel chips vary.

I may try reinstalling later or try a newer fglrx. If that doesn't work I'll just leave the card on the shelf until the next Debian stable is out. Some day it should work.

Anyway, thanks for the help everyone. I appreciate it.

Nah, HD4XXX is a few years old now. R7XX cards statred coming out in mid 2008, some werent released untill mid/late 2009.

The HD5XX cards replaced the HD4XXX cards, and HD6XXX cards are now current (and dont use R7XX chips)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...ocessing_units

From what I've heard the ATI drivers of a few years back were pretty awful. I never ran ATI cards at that point with linux, so I really dont know myself, its just what I've heard.

I've had issues with nVidia drivers and linux here and there. I've had isssues with nVidia drivers and windows for that matter....

Hopefully, I'm right and its just cruft leftover from the nVidia drivers causing problems. It could be AGP, hopefully the guy I know how has an AGP 4XXX card gets back to me (hes always slow). If nothign works, I spose you could leave the card on the shelf, but I'd be temped to ry new open source drivers from testing or sid. The open soruce drivers are getting faster all the time.

No problems.

However, if you dont play games or something like that, open-source driver is far more better than fglrx if you want smoother environemnt with window managers. I uninstalled fglrx and installed open-source, and it feels a lot better now.

*EDIT: This is my setup:
Slackware 13.37 (32-bit)
wm: Fluxbox 1.3.1
Kernel : 3.0.0-eXpander-3.0

direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
client glx version string: 1.4
client glx extensions:
OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R600 (RV730 9495) 20090101 x86/MMX/SSE2 TCL DRI2
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.9.2
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20

X.Org X Server 1.10.3
Current version of pixman: 0.22.2

And here is my xorg.conf file: