Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Anyone using xfce4 with compositing turned off?

[Fernando Rodriguez <frodriguez.developer@outlook.com>]

On Sunday, August 23, 2015 2:25:47 PM walt wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Aug 2015 05:53:37 +0200
> bitlord <bitlord0xff@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 2015-08-22 at 19:08 -0700, walt wrote:
> 
> > > I forgot about xf86-video-ati until you mentioned it, so I just
> > > emerged
> > > it and (I think) made all the changes needed to reconfigure Xorg to
> > > use
> > > it instead of fglrx.
> > > 
> > > Maybe I'm just too tired right now to think straight, but the error
> > > messages I see in Xorg.log tell me that my video chip is not
> > > supported.
> 
> > For radeon (free driver) you need to configure more than Xorg, check
> > wiki article about radeon driver [1], It needs in kernel support, also
> > most cards especially "newer" (>=r600) need proprietary firmware.
> > 
> > 
> > [1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Radeon 
> 
> An excellent wiki page, thanks.  It tells me that my video chip should
> be supported so I'll go back and follow all the steps this time.  I'd
> like to avoid the proprietary ati driver if I can.

I had nothing but trouble with the free driver with a kabini APU. Hibernate 
would give a black screen on resume. The "Dim screen after an inactive period" 
(whatever it's called) would dim it further until the backlight turns off 
everytime the period elapses. And a lot of programs like the adobe flash plugin 
and other players, and games would show video that I may have watched even 
days before but it's still on video memory when started.

The only problem I've had with the proprietary driver (which may be realted to 
your problem) is that if you use a premptive kernel it causes a LOT of errors 
to be written to the syslog which makes the desktop very unresponsive. That's 
because it calls functions that should not be called with preemption enabled. 
If that's your problem you'll see errors on the syslog and I posted a patch 
that disables preemption before calling those functions. It's on a VLC bug 
(cause at first I tought it was a VLC related) and I recently noticed that I 
still get the errors if I switch between X sessions with CTRL-ALT-Fx so it's 
incomplete but it makes things much better. I will update it and post it on 
the right bug when I get around it.


-- 
Fernando Rodriguez