Thinkpad T42p graphics driver

[cozzykim]

Does anyone have any tips to speed up the (2D) graphics on a T42p with ATI FireGl T2 Mobility 128?

Currently using the "r300/r400/r500 based FireGL" driver.

This card doesn't have fglrx support.

Dolphin is very slow, with screen tearing, slow scrolling, slow window population etc.

Video playback is also poor, sometimes down to 5 fps full screen.

I used to have the T41 with Mobility 7500 and found a tweaked xorg.cong for that one which worked quite well, the FireGL T2 doesn't seem to be as common, I haven't found much discussion of tweaking it with quite alot of web searching

[cozzykim]

No hope for this laptop with KDE then I guess?

If I have thunderbird and chrome open and there's an incoming mail, any video or scrolling, or even keyboard input in chrome becomes veeeery slow until the email notification sound plays, as if there's a conflict.

This all seems to be related to the recent KDE updates which also removed a huge amount of installed stuff.

KDE 4.6.5, update notifier currently showing no updates.

I notice that AndrzejL's fix for this problem with ATI cards;

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,67549.0.html

is no longer an option as gtk-qt-engine doesn't seem to be in the repos any more, unless I'm missing something 

I'm feeling very noobish at the moment, sorry 

[menotu]

This all seems to be related to the recent KDE updates which also removed a huge amount of installed stuff.

Can you recall when you previously last updated your system cozzykim?

Have you read Tex's post about running aptupgrade ? If you haven't run it please see following link:

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,96430.0/topicseen.html

[cozzykim]

This all seems to be related to the recent KDE updates which also removed a huge amount of installed stuff.

Can you recall when you previously last updated your system cozzykim?

Have you read Tex's post about running aptupgrade ? If you haven't run it please see following link:

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,96430.0/topicseen.html

Thanks, yes I had some problems with synaptic/update notifier after a previous round of updates, I had a list of updates in synaptic that I couldn't install. (I have so few problems with PCLOS that it takes me a while before I figure out that something's wrong)

Came here and read the aptupgrade post, then did a full update which removed a lot of installed programs.

This is when I started having graphics problems, I know that the previous mentioned fix was a bodge and that the problem is lack of support in the catalyst driver.

Should I run aptupgrade again, the problem with update notifier errors seems to have gone.

If you think that the FireGL T2 is basically a dead horse, then maybe it's time to retire this old T42p and look for something with a better supported graphics card, I'm looking at a T61 with an Nvidia Quadro FX 570M (I like the IBM/Lenovo chassis)

Any more suggestions greatly appreciated as I seem to have got in a mess