Hi gurus,
I have a thinkpad X121e with AMD E450 processor and integrated radeon 6320 graphics. The system seems a little unstable, with occasional lock-up of (seemingly) graphics. This has already lead to a data loss.. Currently I am running ubuntu 11.10 with 3.0.0-14 kernel (amd64). I haven't installed proprietary fglrx drivers.

Any suggestions to improve the stability? Should I try the most recent kernel? Should I tweak the kernel options/modules? Should I try the flgrx driver (although it does not mention 6320 on the webpage).

Thanks in advance!

I'm using the HP dm1z which is the same APU as yours. I have had very good luck with the open source drivers. The closed source drivers on the other hand have caused me a lot of issues with suspend to ram. I'm using a 3.2 kernel in Gentoo.

If you can, try a newer kernel before trying the closed source drivers. Especially if you want to use suspend to ram. As far as stability otherwise goes, I haven't had any graphic problems or lockups with either driver using a 3.2 kernel.

Check out the latest radeon driver - I thought I saw some 6000 series fixes.

Business_kid -- the radeon driver is in the kernel, right? (at least according wikipedia it is...). Compiling the new kernel now, will let you know.

Ion -- what about suspend-to-X? Here suspend-to-ram is unstable, haven't tried suspend-to-disk.

I think you will notice improvements using a 3.2 kernel. Suspend to Ram works great using the open source driver. I had issues with the closed source driver and suspend however.

I had to send my netbook back to repair faulty speakers. I never use hibernate, so I never did test it.

The latest radeon open-source driver will be in the newest kernel you have, and should pretty much work right out of the box in Ubuntu.

radeon.ko is the kernel module. There's also an X driver (xf86-video-ati) which needs a recent system, and is often best compiled from git with a similar mesa. I'm out of touch because my radeon gpus are little, and nothing respectively. I'm currently stuck on the 'nothing' (rs690) and I mean to compile mesa for llvm again on it but I haven't bothered yet.

Running kernel 3.2.1 now.

I havent't experienced any graphics issues more (system was hanging for some period of time), but suspend-to-ram still occasionally refuses to wake up.

Do you use any kernel boot options? Which version of xserver-xorg-video-ati do you have (1.6.14.99 here)?

Hi. My versions are (standard slackware-current as of April last year)
xorg-server-1.9.5
Mesa-7.10.2
pixman-0.20.2
libdrm-2.4.23
xf86-video-ati-6.14.1

For console only, the kernel is grand. For X, you need recent versions of all this stuff. There was some significant change in xorg-server around 1.7.5; mesa has gone from 7.9.x --> 7.11.x and xf86-video-ati from 6.12.x -->6.14.99 last seen(=6.15 beta)

In a word, you would profit from a newer distro. I tried to update an older distro, and it ended with me undoing my efforts. I wouldn't recommend it.

EDIT: On the positive side, the r300 driver is pretty well sorted, so you won't have to do this again to yourself.