ATI Non-free drivers for legacy cards & Input issues

[Yeand1961]

I have a Dell machine, Dimension E520 with an ATI X1300 which is one of the older cards ATI dropped linux support for after the 9.3 Catalyst (driver) release.

Currently with Lenny (netinsted only 2 weeks ago) the ATI drivers are rock solid with, believe it or not, better performance than the card could pump out under winxp. Given that the 9.3 drivers are almost a year old the update manager keeps flagging the later drivers to be installed, is there any way of taking this off the update check list, aswell as x.org and glibc so my drivers don't become broken? And would this take dependencies into account?

I'm also having really odd keymapping issues. X is now fine but only after I tweaked the mapping alot, even though US/Intl always worked fine in other distro's (Ubuntu/liteblue). Outside of X though the mapping is rooted. I choose 'English/UK' during installation if that matters? The keyboard is stock/regular Dell issue like all cheap keyboards.

I've read everything I can find about mice input settings under linux but with deb i'm a bit lost. How for the love of god do you disable that awful "Emulate3Buttons" setting? Also under deb with raw input settings enabled in games the mouse is awfully slow.. around a 3rd slower (distance moved to response) while again under other distro's a tried out before settling on deb the mouse response is as expected. Any ideas?

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Given that the 9.3 drivers are almost a year old the update manager keeps flagging the later drivers to be installed, is there any way of taking this off the update check list

Code: Select all

# aptitude install fglrx-driver=$version

Replace $version with the actual version number. Or use pinning instead, see apt_preferences(5) for details.

aswell as x.org and glibc so my drivers don't become broken?

Why do you think you need to hold the X & glibc packages? The fglrx-driver's dependencies only list libc6>=2.3.4 so that doesn't seem to be needed, xserver-xorg-core is an unversioned dependency. Holding libc6 would almost certainly break your box anyway.

Have you actually tried the open source radeon drivers (with the non-free firmware installed)? I found the performance difference to be marginal and the reliability to be better.

I'm also having really odd keymapping issues.

Please open a new thread for this problem (and remove the reference to "input issues" from the title of this thread). Only one issue per thread is a stipulation of the forum guidelines.