Earlier this week, I watched a DVD on my Presario 2140us laptop for the first time,
using xine. I'm using slackware stable, which I update regularly against one of
the official slackware mirrors. I've only installed a few "outside" packages, all
but the last from linuxpackages.net:

1. libdvdcss (needed for DVD playback, as a google search revealed)
2. ratpoison (very interesting window manager)
3. w3m (text-based browser; i like the vi syntax; why isn't it part of the
official slackware installation anymore, by the way?)
4. prism54 (wireless driver for my netgear card).

While watching the DVD, I noticed that the picture and sound were off-sync in
places. I think this was because I'm using the vesa driver (but, on the other hand,
the fact that the movie was The Blair Witch Project could have had a lot to do with it).
Anyway, proceeding on the assumption that I need to get a driver for my ATI Mobility
Radeon IGP 320M graphics card, I did some research and this is what I found:

1. according to the ATI site "Display drivers and multimedia applications for notebooks
with ATI graphics solutions are available for download from your Notebook manufacturer",
but not from ATI, it seems.

2. Sourceforge has ATI drivers for XFree86 4.3.0, which is what I'm using. A brief exploration
of the site did not reveal any useful documentation, however.

As I mentioned, the packages I'm using are all default slackware-stable, although kept up to
date; so, for example, I'm using the 2.4.26 kernel. Any advice from someone who was in a
similar situation? I don't mind switching to XFree86 4.4.0, for example, if experience shows
that to be the most practicable solution.

It's most likely a problem with your software, xine, for playing the movie, if you pause the movie, move the place in it back then forward again to where you were and play it it should be fine. What are the specs on the computer? Possibly a little too slow to handle it? My PIII 600 laptop with an 8mb ati card handles full screen DVD's fine in xine/mplayer

thank you for your reply. it's a fairly new laptop: athlon 2200+, 64MB builtin ati card.
you don't think i'm taking a significance performance hit by using the VESA driver instead of an ATI driver?

For watching movies you should at least activate 2D support for your IGP 320M.
You should use the radeon-driver. This line must be in your XF86Config-4 (or however this file is named in Slackware):

Driver "radeon"

If your XFree86 does not support 2D (4.3.0 does not support it but 4.3.0.1 and later does) you should download and install the drivers from here:
http://www.luckys-page.de/radeon_drivers.tgz
Then you have to choose a radeon card in your X-Configuration-tool (dunno what it is in Slackware).

Thomas

Yes, I'd definitely use the newer radeon drivers, no questions asked.

thank you for the input, gentlemen.

i watched another movie with xine last night and the voice was in-sync with the picture this time. something else i noticed is that whenver i scroll down in mozilla using the vertical tab at the right of the screen, the screen ripples. ok, so i have to get the radeon driver, but i want to be careful about it, since the ATI site makes a distinction between cards such as the Radeon 9800 series, for which they do provide a linux driver, and the Radeon Mobility, for which they don't. Has anyone managed to get the ATI Mobility Radeon IGP 320M going?

Move to Xfree86 4.4.0. It has new radeon drivers suited for IGP 320/340M chipsets.
No 3D acceleration for my 340M but at least I can see DVD movies fine.
Xfree86 4.4.0 has a simple script to install binaries, so it makes the installation process very easy.
If you have problem about the new license of Xfree86 you can also move to Xorg... at the moment it shows similar features.
Ciao

Excellent! Thanks, urka58.

here is a direct link to the 3.90 ATI drivers for Linux which were just released. But looks to me that they still have not sorted out the issue with drivers that were designed with xf86 4.3 to work with 4.4 yet. This could cause you a pain in the royal rear later on when you wish to upgrade some programs that require xf86 4.4.

thank you for the warning, Schrambo. as far as I can tell, it doesn't apply to the igp drivers, though.

ok, here is what i did:

1. i downloaded all the .tgz files from the /pub/slackware/slackware-current/slackware/x/ directory of one of the slackware mirrors. these are the x.org packages, as xfree86 isn't supported by slackware anymore. the packages are:

x11-6.7.0-i486-4
x11-devel-6.7.0-i486-4
x11-docs-6.7.0-noarch-1
x11-docs-html-6.7.0-noarch-1
x11-fonts-100dpi-6.7.0-noarch-1
x11-fonts-cyrillic-6.7.0-noarch-1
x11-fonts-misc-6.7.0-noarch-1
x11-fonts-scale-6.7.0-noarch-1
x11-xnest-6.7.0-i486-1
x11-xprt-6.7.0-i486-1
x11-xvfb-6.7.0-i486-1

2. i upgraded all the old xfree 4.3.0 packages i had using the syntax "upgradepkg oldpkg%newpkg" on each pair of corresponding packages

3. i ran xorgcfg, which detected everything automatically (my card was detected as "Radeon Mobility U1") and wrote the configuration file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xorg.conf -- didn't have to do a thing, except click to save the configuration.

i have no ripples now when i scroll down with mozilla, and xine works well as far as i tested (first few seconds of Jurassic Park). good.

however, there is a strange new problem: as soon as i start x, the first and second columns in all the consoles, <alt>f1 - <alt>f6, move closer to each other than they should be. this persists even after i shut x down. once i reboot, everything is ok, until i start x again. on lilo.conf, i have "VESA framebuffer console @ 1024x768x256" (vga=773).