Finally had the courage to upgrade to Natty - love Unity.

Well, as usual it was not an easy upgrade (given the fact that most of the linux versions have problems on the latest hardware) as I am used running the LTS versions as Linux is my primary dev environment.

As to my surprise, this time the Radeon drivers got upgraded easily and i915 Intel drivers failed. So had to black list the on-board display card and Natty's Unity showed up. I must say I love it.

This cheat sheet is really good to get addicted with Unity.

vgaswitcheroo seems to need more fine tuning.

Well, I was impressed by the PowerXpress (Crossfire technology) that will save battery life and hours.

as searched over the internet, the vgaswitcheroo/switch did not solve many of these problems... like turning off the discrete card in PowerXpress mode.

so Installed the ATI vendor driver on SUSE and it seemed to work fine till now. But still turning off the disceret card doesn't increase the battery remaining time since both the internal and discreet cards are on..

Keeping fingers crossed for this thing to happen..

Ciao..

Latest brand new laptop that I bought : HP dm4t

Yeah, I trashed windows and HPs ridiculous Recovery partition (30GB load of crap)

dm4t
• Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
• Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-560M Dual Core Processor (2.66 GHz, 3MB L3 Cache) with Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz
• 512MB ATI Mobility Radeon(TM) HD 6370 DDR3 switchable graphics [HDMI, VGA]
• 6GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
• 500GB 7200RPM Hard Drive with HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
• No Additional Office Software
• No additional security software
• High Capacity 6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery (standard)
• 14.0" diagonal High-Definition HP BrightView LED Display (1366 x 768)
• SuperMulti 8X DVD+/-R/RW with Double Layer Support
• HP TrueVision Webcam and Fingerprint Reader
• 802.11b/g/n WLAN and Bluetooth(R)
• Standard Keyboard
• HP Home & Home Office Store in-box envelope

Installing Suse 11.4 / Ubuntu 10.10 ATI Radeon HD6370 propriatary driver on hp dm4t

Well, I tried the Xorg (OSS) version of the driver (radeonhd) and looks like the support for this specific card is not available..

Hence, I tried installing the vendor driver the AMD ATI Catalyst for Linux.

well, before that, we have to uninstall radeonhd (SUSE : YAST->Software management) which is installed by default when the OS is installed..

now download this

http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-11-2-x86.x86_64.run

do the following

chmod +x /temp/ati-driver-installer-11-2-x86.x86_64.run

sh ./temp/ati-driver-installer-11-2-x86.x86_64.run

choose auto discovery option then shutdown -r now

you should have the display driver installed and all the 3D effect you wanted.

I must say, the rendering performance is much slower than the radeonHD opensource version, but radeonHD driver has some driver load issues when booted without the nomodeset option due to the recent switch to DKMS route chosen by the Linux community...

As always, open source developers will find a way out for this.