Comment 177 for bug 121653

@David: I found the same as you initially - it *appeared* to fix suspend, but in fact fglrx just hadn't loaded at bootup.

I installed Catalyst 7.11 via ATI's installer (which installs fglrx 8.43.2) and added various xorg.conf options (eg load "dri", load "glx", option "AIGLX" "on"). But I could see from both fglrxinfo and the ATI Catalyst Control Center that it was still using Mesa for opengl.

To get it to work properly, I had to do a few other things:

1. When I ran "modprobe -vf fglrx", it said something like "install /sbin/lrm-video fglrx" (it should say nothing). I commented out the line containing fglrx in /etc/modprobe.d/lrm-video and this fixed it.

2. In the log (dmesg | grep fglrx) there was a message that said something like "fglrx: ... firegl_stub_register failed". I removed radeontool using Synaptic and rebooted.

After this, it was using fglrx for opengl. Of course I still had to whitelist fglrx in /usr/bin/compiz to get compiz working.

The nice thing about fglrx is that with compiz off, 2D rendering is significantly faster (eg displaying images in GQView) than the open source drivers, and 3D apps like Google Earth work (when I try running Google Earth using the open source drivers, it runs chronically slow and often freezes the desktop completely so I have to reboot the PC).

But I find fglrx still has the same suspend problem and compiz performance problems that others have mentioned earlier:

1. Suspend is still broken.

2. With compiz on, animations are 'jerky' (eg when moving windows or minimising to taskbar). Sometimes they are lightning fast, other times they stop briefly half way through so the animations don't flow smoothly like they do using the open-source drivers.

3. With compiz on, apps like Google Earth flicker badly during animations (like when it starts up, showing a spinning Earth).

4. With compiz on, x-video doesn't work (eg no video appears in Totem) even though fglrx says it is a xv provider. If you turn off xv (ie using gstreamer-properties), zoomed video is pixellated, and in any event it's unwatchable on my system because the frame rate is about 1 frame per second.

5. With compiz on, generally 2D rendering is slower, eg it's very noticeably slower to redraw the screen when you restore Firefox or Thunderbird from the taskbar.