F8x86_64 on the Acer Ferrari 3400LMi
9.1 Suspend
I am glad to see that both Suspend to Disk and Suspend to RAM works like a charm. Previous there has been a lot of struggle, if at all possible, to get a stable and reliable ACPI support. OK, I know that suspend has been around for a while by now, but hand on the heart has it been user friendly and reliable? I have not had that experience. So a reliable ACPI support right out of the box feels really luxurious.
Even the special sleep key, FnF4, is configured during the installation and works as expected (Suspend to RAM). The power button works of course as well, as it always has done.
9.2 CPU frequency scaling
The CPU frequency scaling has been working for quite some time now. So it is no big surprise that it works out of the box in F8 on this puppy. However, it is always nice to see things evolve and improve. The improvements of the suspend functionality mentioned above together with solid CPU frequency management really shows off in power management.
KPowersave now feels really mature and has three preconfigured CPU policies: Performance, Dynamic and Powersave. Dynamic is the default and there is no real reason to change it.
10 Graphics
The advancement of Xorg and its related drivers and modules has been enormous the last two years. Fedora 8 includes Xorg 7.2 which is a welcome improvement in Xserver configuration. Furthermore, there is absolutely no need to use the ATI proprietary driver any more. This is a true liberation, for sure I will not miss all the violations the proprietary ATI driver did to my Xorg configuration.
The graphical hardware is properly identified and setup during the installation, so you will enjoy X11 right from the start.
Another nice thing is that the dim display button, FnF6, works without any configurations.
10.1 Basics
The Ferrari 3400 is equipped with a ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 chip. This chip has 128MB of memory and provides two external outputs, VGA0 and Svideo. The builtin display is called LVDS. These names refer to the definitions used by the radeon X driver.
The graphical chip has 2 CRTCs, eg pipeline for rendering graphics. This means that only two outputs may be active simultaneously, either LVDS + VGA0, LVDS
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