[SOLVED] Slow GUI (Compiz) on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) using ATI Radeon X300 Mobility

Posted by Mr. IT Guy | Filed under IT in General, Linux, Operating System

I tried to install Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on my Dell Latitude D610 using the Wubi install method. Everything installs just fine, but I feel that the GUI is very slow. My Latitude D610 is using ATI Radeon X300 Mobility, which I think is not the best video card for Linux. Throughout my experience, Linux is more suited with the nVidia cards.

If anyone has every experienced running Windows XP using a VESA/default graphic card driver at high resolution, that’s how it feels. For those who are not familiar, it feels that the screen refreshes very slowly. For example, when I open up terminal, I can see rectangular dotted outline zooming out before the window pops out. After that it slowly draws the window decoration. Another example, when I scroll a web page on Firefox, the top part of the next page would be drawn first, then half a second later, the lower part is drawn. It is very annoying and almost rendering the GUI non-usable. FYI, the GUI is set with visual effects set to “None”.

I have tried to install linux-restricted-modules, xorg-driver-fglrx, xserver-xgl and the official ATI drivers but to no avail. I have run a check on the fglrxinfo and it’s fine. I even tried the glxgears, but only getting about 60fps.

I am still trying to fix the issue, and will update what I found out later on a separate blog entry.

UPDATE:Fixed HOWTO

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Tags: compiz, Linux, ubuntu

Permalink | April 25th, 2008

One Response to “[SOLVED] Slow GUI (Compiz) on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) using ATI Radeon X300 Mobility”

Fixed: Slow GUI on Hardy Heron | Life in 0 and 1 Says:
May 5th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
[...] I finally managed to fix the issue described: Slow GUI in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) using ATI Radeon X300 Mobility [...]

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