I just installed Fedora Core 3 on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8600 w Centrino). First, I must say that I am really impressed with the hardware support. Almost everything works as expected (well, I didn't try the modem) including bluetooth ppp, wlan, extenal harddisk, dvd writer, battery saving and so on. The only thing that doesn't work as expected is the graphics card, an ATI 9600 (128 MB). Basically I have two problems
* When computer the laptop after putting it to sleep, the graphics gets totally corrupted. The computer hasn't crashed (responds to ping, soft power off works etc) but there is no way of restoring graphics.
* I tried enabling the composite extension to have translucent windows etc (after all, it's 2005 ), but that didn't work at all. The ATI binary drivers failed complaining about missing XDamage support. I also tried downloading the latest snapshot from DRI . freedesktop . org (sorry, posting URLs is not allowed it seems). That way I got X running, but when I use xcompmgr everything looks terrible and gets incredibly slow (no hardware acceleration at all i seems). And I mean really slow, moving a window is next to impossible (~0.5 fps). OpenGL support seems to work, though, using the ATI drivers. I only had tuxracer installed so I couldn't really see how good it performed. glxgears gets ~2500 fps, though.

Are the above problems bugs in the ATI driver or just a result of my senseless hacking with config files (there are a LOT of options to the ATI driver and I really don't know what some of them do)? Has anyone got a Radeon card working fully and wouldn't mind sharing?

Oh, and here is some system info:
uname -a: Linux xxx 2.6.10-1.770_FC3 #1 Thu Feb 24 14:00:06 EST 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
ATI driver: fglrx_6_8_0-8.10.19-1
X -version: X Window System Version 6.8.1 Release Date: 17 September 2004

After some more reading, it seems people are using the ATI drivers with varying degree of success. Most concerns are about Opengl, it seems.
Are there anyone out there with an ATI laptop that has actually got it working? It's getting really annoying having to reboot everytime I take a break (especially since Fedora takes ages to boot).

Turn off the composite extension. The ATI binary drivers don't support it yet (it's slow because it's doing all the translucency stuff in software). No solution but to wait for the open source drivers to improve or for ati to get off their butt.

Just letting you know you aren't alone here. My laptop has some of the same problems. I'm probably going to sell it and nab a laptop with an nvidia card.

I realized this because the graphics was all corrupted with composite on. However, even without composite, the graphics gets corrupted after wakeup. This is also the case with the radeon driver that came on the distro CD.

Will I solve the problem by getting and compiling the latest CVS xorg? I prefer to know beforehand because I'm on dialup right now so I don't want a huge CVS checkout unless it'll really help.