Thinkpads Forum

Hello everyone,

I am experiencing some poor graphics performance on my Thinkpad and I'm hoping someone could help me out.

I have a Thinkpad T42p (2373W6B) and I have installed RHEL 3 (from CentOS.org) on it. I have also installed the ATI drivers from ATI's site (my T42p has a Mobility Fire GL T2). After installing, I can run at the max resolution (1400x1050) but graphics applications (VTK, for example) run very slowly.

Could it be that hardware accelleration is not enabled? Have I missed a step?

Thanks in advance for any input you can provide.

James

Hi James, welcome to the forum.

I have Redhat Release 4 but this I think should work for your release.

Download the drivers.

rpm -i --force --noscripts fglrx-8.10.19 (just in case the build fails)
cd /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod
chmod a+x make.sh
./make.sh
cd ..
chmod a+x make_install.sh
./make_install.sh


If you are going through so much work, you might consider installing the newer version 4.

I can't say that I fixed it, but rather that I figured out what has happened.

So the first thing I did when I got this Thinkpad was throw RHEL 3.0 (CentOS) on it.

The second thing I did was download the RPM from ATI for this adapter, install it, and then run the fgrexconfig (sp?) command to configure the driver.

The third thing I did was update *all* packages on my system using 'yum'. This included a new kernel, which is now the default kernel in GRUB.

I was sitting here thinking about my problem and thought, "I wonder if this driver worked in the old kernel?" So I rebooted and - voila - it's rockin'.

So it appears that installing ATI's RPM does some behind-the-scenes adjusting or something kernel-related to get it to work. Ugh. Another reason for me to be scared of RPM. I don't like not know what the h*ll is going on.

Does anyone know exactly what ATI's RPM is doing besides installing its software?

Thanks for your insight, dfumento.

James

I can't say exactly what it is doing, but two of the steps involve builds and you are required to have the kernel headers in order to do the install.

I'd try to do the ATI install procedure over again with the new kernel.

I'm using the ATI with the updated kernel.