ATI - 'Mobilty Radeon M9' or 'Mobility Radeon 8500'

[mickfromperth 0]

G'day,

 

I recently purchased a Laptop with an 'ATI Mobility M9' graphics processor, it came with windows and i'm wanting to migrate to linux, its just so much better.. I'm trying to establish wether there is any support for my GPU, but I can't sort out what exactly my GPU is..

 

The specs say its an M9, but the windows drivers say its a Radeon Mobility 8500. One is an R200 chips the other is an rv250 chips (accoring to the ATI info on the DRI pages)...

 

Are any of you ware of a way to find exaclty what hardware I'm running..

 

The other question of course is how to find out wether there is linux support for whatever chip i am running.. Looking through the ATI pages there is _no_ linux support for any of the mobile chipsets from ATI themselves.. The Xfree86 page doesn't go into alot of detail on which chips there is hardware support for.. Any pointers on this as well?

 

Thanks in advace for any info..

 

Mick

[gfolkert 0]

Boot from the CDROM, use the tools available to you in it. Like lspci, lsmod among quite a few others.

 

Once you see how Knoppix treats it, you'll know exactly how it us supported. Knoppix Primary FTP site

 

I use KNOPPIX for hardware discovery, it's got "Super-Computing Hardware Detection POWERZ"

[Tekchip 0]

Knoppix is good for doing the down and dirty stuff. You might consider a Suse Live eval cd just to see how well a 'general' linux distro will run on your machine. I'm sure the tools mentioned previously are probably also available from the suse disks.

 

http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/suse_linux/index.html(live eval is about 2/3 of the way down the page.)