I'm a much happier camper now. It wasn't just one thing I did wrong in my first FC8 attempt.
First, the x1250 driver from livna is the amd driver rpmed for fedora. Please correct me if I'm wrong here.
The open source driver is called radeonHD, and I have not tried it, and don't plan to do so until it is more mature. Awesome that AMD has opened this up. Very nice!
My big solution for the problems I was seeing was the good old xorg ModeLine
Samsung syncmaster 941 ATI onboard x1250
# this one looked "flaky" it was generated by $>gtf 1400 900 60 -x
#Modeline "1400x900_60.00" 104.23 1400 1480 1632 1864 900 901 904 932
# this is one someone posted on a blog. It works but my monitor OSD complains it isn't optimum
ModeLine "1400x900" 100 1400 1500 1600 1700 900 1000 1100 1200
# this one doesn't work
#ModeLine "1440x900_75.00" 136.49 1440 1536 1688 1936 900 901 904 940
If you want me to post my xorg.conf let me know.
The FC7 x86_64 stuff seems much better. I loaded an XFCE, and haven't missed KDE or GNOME yet. I did not load firefox x86_64 at all, used all 32bit stuff. That made all my stuff work great, mplayerplug-in, sun jre plugin, flash, etc.
If you want me to talk more about this let me know.
I played nexuiz, for a minute, but got a lockup. It looked great until it locked up
I had been playing with X a lot, so I think that caused the lock, not sure yet.
I would like to know more about any problems caused by using the max shared memory for x1250. I would like to use the max I think its 1024MB, or 512MB on my mobo. ( gigabyte ga-ma69g-s3h )
Thanks,
C