SuSE 8.2 on a Dell C640 Laptop... OpenGL... etc
 

I recently gave notice to my employer because I am taking a better position with another firm (going from AXA to MetLife). I bought out my lease on my Dell c640 laptop and bought partition commander, shrunk the windoze partition, removed the little Dell partition (made it a FAT32 partition for shuttling > 54MB files back and forth), and installed SuSE 8.2 on the other half of the relatively little (20 GB) Hard Drive. Installation went fine. SuSE auto-detected everything and configured everything it could use (the winModem is useless, but I expected that). Using ReiserFS as my filesystem. In All, Linux boots much faster on the same hardware... and shuts down much faster too. Duel booting with GRUB is working great.

My main problem is I am using the OpenGL. The built-in graphics chip identifies as an ATI Radeon Mobility 7500. I've got OpenGL working well enough to run TuxRacer, Celestia, and a few other things fine (using the open source DRI driver modules). What I'm wondering is whether there is any commercial driver for the Radeon 7500 that can improve performance??? Neverwinter Nights looks and responds horribly (just a waste of HD space right now). Any suggestions???

*****Problem 2*****

The other problem is USB connections to an HP Photosmart 435 camera. Trying to connect it as a USB mass storage device fails (locks up the USB module which takes the trackpad pointer and keyboard with it). Trying to connect as a PTP camera just causes the camera application in Linux (no matter what one) to segfault (still better than locking the entire system). I have this problem on my desktop system as well (generic P4 2.4GHz on a Intel motherboard with an nVidia GeForce4 MX, also running SuSE 8.2). Any suggestions there either???

PS - The current work-around on my desktop is to use the SD card with a single slot SD card reader to transfer the images, which works like a charm.

*****Problem 3*****

The laptop's ACPI power features are not working quite right. I can't monitor the battery's level in Linux. I guess the BIOS has all the monitor features working OK (shuting things down when idle or when battery is low), and I can monitor the battery if I boot into the BIOS and flip to that screen. But the Linux apps to do this aren't working. Is there a simple fix (no kernel re-compiles) to get these features working???


Thanks for any help in advance.