Last week Kevin pointed out that ATI has finally released a 3D accelerated driver (their binary-only driver) which doesn't completely break when you suspend. The stock xorg driver is ok, but at 1600x1200 display resolution even on 2D work it can be kind of slow. However, I suspend usually twice a day or more (it's a laptop, duh!) so a driver that didn't work with suspend wasn't very useful. After only 9 months, ATI has fixed the suspend issue.

The livna.org site has RPMs of the drivers available. See their configuration page (http://rpm.livna.org/configuration.html) for documentation on how to set it up. Basically you just do:

• Get the yum repository file: rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/4/i386/RPMS.lvn/livna-release-4-0.lvn.5.4.noarch.rpm
• Get their key: rpm --import http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY
• Get the kernel module: yum install kernel-module-fglrx-$(uname -r)
• You should be able to reboot now to get the new driver in X. I was able to do it without rebooting, by going to init level 3, removing the old ATI driver and loading the new one, then going back to init level 5. Rebooting is probably the better option though.

Note that the livna RPM provides a way to switch back to the stock driver: "/usr/sbin/ati-fglrx-config-display disable".

This driver has been working pretty well for me. I had it lock up on me yesterday when I was trying to play a video using mplayer and one of the video drivers it includes. However, I forgot that I had accelerated 3D. I tried it this morning using the mplayer gl output and it worked great. 20% CPU usage to play a 320x200 video I took yesterday from my camera.

Thanks again to Kevin for pointing out that ATI finally got their suspend act together.
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