Ubuntu 7.10 with Beryl on ATI Mobility Radeon X700

2008-04-11

It took a day of playing but it is possible to get Beryl running with the proprietary ATI X700 drivers at a reasonable speed under Ubuntu (on an Acer Aspire 1691wlmi)

The biggest problem is the fact that the X700 chipset along with a bunch of others are black listed by compiz in the config file and therefore the system won't even attempt to run 3d acceleration

In the compiz config file located here:

/usr/bin/compiz

you will find a whole list of black-listed hardware based on drivers and PCI ids.
remove the PCI id of your card, for the pci-e x700 it'd included on the line

T="$T 1002:3152 1002:3150 1002:5462 1002: 5653 # ati x300 x600,x600 x700"

just remove it by preceeding it with a #
after you have done that you can install the native drivers, play around with your xorg config and the card responds fairly well.

you might also consider installing the XGL server
#sudo apt-get install xserver-xgl

To disable Xgl autostart for this user, create a file named ~/.config/xserver-xgl/disable