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I have the Asus Eee-pc 1015T - this is an AMD based netbook and it comes with a great AMD Radeon HD 4250 vga.

With Windows 7 it can play 1080p HD video smoothly and during normal usage the average noise level it's quite low.

with Ubuntu 11.04 beta 1 the standard installed vga driver is the Gallium 3D 0.4 which is good for a normal netbook experience but it causes 3 main problems:

  1. Average fan noise level is really annoying;

  2. High battery consumption;

  3. It can't reproduce even 720p HD video.

Issue 3 isn't critical for me.

Ubuntu restricted driver doesn't show any proprietary driver available for my configuration but in synaptic well-known fglrx driver are present.

So how could I sort out issues 1 and 2? Does fglrx work better with 4250 HD? Is there a program to control my eee-pc fan-speed?

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  • The standard 11.04 install appears to still have this problem. My ATI card's fan stays on full speed after resuming from sleep, however it works OK, (not always on) after a reboot. So the problem is caused only when resuming from sleep.
    – Bruce Edge
    May 24, 2011 at 12:42

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Eliminating fan noise in Linux with Catalyst driver ( fglrx )

sudo apt-get install fglrx
sudo aticonfig --initial

Then reboot.

Open Ati Catalyst Control Center, locate the "powerplay" setting and set to "optimize for battery usage"

This kills the constant fan noise as ati card runs with minimal power and thus cooler. In normal linuxes it is enough to run compiz or games.

Note for 11.04beta : fglrx ( no matter what settings ) does NOT work with unity.You need unity-2d or ubuntu-classic desktop with no effects-

radeon driver works with unity, but has no real powersettings ( it has some, but fan runs also often above the accepatable, so its a no go - I also have a laptop and need it silent .. so fglrx is the only way )

When 11.04 is final fglrx and unity will of course work , but not yet.

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    fglrx + unity works with 11.04 for me.
    – Jorge Castro
    Apr 4, 2011 at 0:21
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For my laptop flgrx runs about 30 degrees cooler then the opensource driver at idle. There is a bug for this on lauchpad.

If you can change to flgrx the fan will spend a lot more time off or at low speeds.

Also the flgrx driver should handle the 1080p playback much better.

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AMD is working on the open radeon driver and with my Radeon HD5850, it's much better than the proprietary driver. But I think there's still issues with the HD4xxx-series. But I would certainly try the radeon driver. You can install it easily: http://apt.ubuntu.com/p/xserver-xorg-video-radeon

Also that driver has become much better in 11.10, which will soon be available. I'm not recommending that you switch to it yet. It's by no means ready for normal use yet.

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