Trashing a laptop in one easy step
My Thinkpad T60p has been running Ubuntu for about 4 months and I’ve enjoyed [almost] every moment. I agree it is not perfect - suspend / hibernate still not supported - but with a multi-desktop GUI, a very productive dock (Avant Window Manager), remote terminals (VNC and Remote Desktop), business tools, research tools, etc. I’ve made very good use of the machine.
Recently, I’ve been wanting suspend and hibernate to work and recently there has been a bunch of internet traffic about new ATI drivers - specifically the new Catalyst 7.12 driver. I followed the easy instructions and rebooted to be witness to a video disaster - the video rendering of Comiz and VLC were very slow.. I panicked but had enough still functioning to try the alternate install process. That was worse - now I had a square block under the cursor that would appear more often than not and remain until some other action refreshed the screen.
I Googled for a solution and started editing the xorg.conf. That was a *big* mistake. On the next re-boot, I ended up with a whopping 800×600 display and not much else. In a panic, I Googled some more and got instructions for unistalling my mess. Yet another big mistake as I dug the hole even deeper. When I finished uninstalling what the instructions indicated, and rebooted, I had lost my network.
The saga went on for a couple more hours. I finally got networking back. Then I looked for my old instructions and found some that were good enough.
The consisted of …
- install the ATI 8.42.3 driver
- check the install with “fglrxinfo” to see the following:
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI MOBILITY FireGL V5200
OpenGL version string: 2.0.6473 (8.37.6)
- check your xorg.conf against the one for the “good enough” link
This whole ordeal would have been easier if I had not been traveling as I could simply restore my system form the NAS. All the backups in the world can’t help when they’re not accessible. I guess my next trick should be cloud storage !
