Samsung P35: openSuSE 11 and Compiz

After I had completely f**ked up my X-Server by trying different fglrx drivers in order to get a reasonable compiz 3d-Acceleration, I finally decided to throw away my openSuSE 10.3 and install openSuSE 11 on my Samsung P35 XVM 1600 II, graphics card ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 series. Installation went smooth, apart from the interesting suggestion of the setup program not to just mount my home partition, but format it (yes, you should be careful about that as well - I don't want to lose all my settings just because openSuSE thinks that might be a good idea).

After the reboot, I was more than impressed... Compiz was running out of the box, without even the need to use the ati fglrx driver. This is the proof, with the radeon driver included in the XServer version of openSuSE 11 the card definitely runs AIGLX - by the way also without the well known "freeze after ending an x-session" error. Video playback of embedded flash movies in firefox unfortunately flickers a little bit. But if you use fusion-icon, you can switch back to Kwin as window manager temporarily for viewing (add the openSuSE Build: Xgl/Xorg repo to Yast in order to find fusion-icon). On the other hand, playing movies with Kaffeine doesn't show flicker at all.

The hotkeys don't work out of the box, but it is sufficient to look for acerhk in Yast after adding the standard repos and choose the appropriate rpm for your kernel flavor (which you can also get by opening Konqueror and typing sysinfo:/ into the adress bar). After the necessary reboot all the (important) hotkeys work.