acertimeline team mailing list archive

[Damon Rand <damon@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Well, I wonder if my trouble with compiz and sleep resume is a compiz
problem with ATI radeon drivers, not a problem with sleep resume on my
timeline.

Screen brightness works out of the box for me. :-)

And actually, it turns out my "power management" button in the top
right does go on and off when I am on battery. It does nothing when
I'm on mains power. I guess thats as it should be.

I did some battery tests after I wrote that report, and dispite the
new ATI drivers I still only got just over three hours til full
discharge with discrete graphics. Thats with all the power management
stuff enabled and medium screen brightness. And I was just playing
some mp3s and doing a little coding. As I mentioned, its even worse
with hybrid graphics cause the radeon card just sits there throwing
out heat.

I think just having the ATI card is a battery killer right now until
it becomes possible to switch it off. Look forward to the Linux hybrid
graphics effort to come to fruition. I hope they focus on just being
able to turn the discrete cards off in the short term.

Damon.

2009/6/25 Sean Russell <seanerussell@xxxxxxxxx>:
> Thanks for the report, Damon!
>
> Maybe it is time for us to start collecting lspci, BIOS, and OS install
> config dumps, because I'm seeing widely varying reports of feature success
> here.  For example, sleep/resume has worked for me since the first time I
> tried it, and I haven't changed anything (effects are still on).  On the
> other hand, the touchpad on/off button is strictly one-way for me, but
> appears to be working for others.
>
> Have you done any battery benchmarks between the discrete and hybrid modes?
>
> Finally, I've also resolved one issue on my Acer: screen brightness control
> wasn't working.  The following command enables it (it needs to be run every
> time you log in to X):
>
>   xrandr --output LVDS --set BRIGHTNESS_CONTROL legacy
>
> --- SER
>
> On Jun 24, 2009 11:43 PM, "Damon Rand" <damon@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I've worked around a few issues that people might be interested in.
>
> 1. You can get the latest Acer BIOS 1.20 now which enables a switch
> between Hybrid and Discrete graphics on my 4810TG with Radeon graphics.
>
> 2. When you switch to discrete graphics I can confirm that the ATI
> Catalyst 9.6 drivers work a treat. And the drivers lower the GPU power
> consumption and improve heat and battery life under 9.04.
>
> 3. There is a bug with the WIFI card on WPA2 security with 11n routers.
> I worked around this by disabling 11n support. You do this by setting
> param 11n_disable50=1 on the iwlagn kernel driver. Apparently its
> fixed properly in the latest kernal but I tried 2.6.30.something and
> it didn't do much for me.
> http://intellinuxwireless.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1934
>
> 4. Resume from standby/hibernate was freezing on me with compiz
> enabled. Turn off all visual effects and it works fine.
>
> And the things I'm still waiting on:
>
> 1. When I disable the touchpad I need standby/resume to get it working
> again.
> 2. Video playback crashes with Catalyst drivers. Apparently this will
> be fixed in 9.7.
> 3. The power management button seems to do nothing for me but I don't
> really mind too much.
> 4. Don't want to upgrade my kernel to get the ahci stuff so still on
> ide for now.
>
> Damon.
>
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