3 monitors and Updated xorg mesa drivers for Ubuntu Natty

Matthieu — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 18:34:23 +0000

I’m currently running Ubuntu Natty as my primary OS at work.

My setup is a Precision T3500 workstation that came with two NVIDIA Quadro cards which were a nightmare for Linux support. I heard that ATI cards supported 3 monitors on one card, as long as one of them was DisplayPort. I saw a cheap Radeon HD 5450 on sale for about $40, so I picked it up only to notice that it had an HDMI port instead of DisplayPort. I figured I’d try it anyway and was surprised to find that with the open-source radeon driver, 3 monitors work! One is connected by VGA, one HDMI and one DVI.

I had, however been experiencing random X crashes, and I suspect the problem was with the radeon driver.

Currently testing out some updated xorg drivers found at:

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?50038-Updated-and-Optimized-Ubuntu-Free-Graphics-Drivers

My system specs:

$ sudo lshw -short
H/W path         Device      Class       Description
====================================================
                             system      Precision WorkStation T3500 ()
/0                           bus         09KPNV
/0/0                         memory      64KiB BIOS
/0/400                       processor   Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           W3530  @ 2.80GHz
/0/400/700                   memory      256KiB L1 cache
/0/400/701                   memory      1MiB L2 cache
/0/400/704                   memory      8MiB L3 cache
/0/1000                      memory      14GiB System Memory
/0/1000/0                    memory      2GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/1                    memory      2GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/2                    memory      2GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/3                    memory      4GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/4                    memory      4GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/5                    memory      DIMM DDR3 Synchronous [empty]
/0/100                       bridge      5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub to ESI Port
/0/100/1                     bridge      5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 1
/0/100/1/0       eth0        network     82574L Gigabit Network Connection
/0/100/3                     bridge      5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 3
/0/100/3/0                   display     Cedar PRO [Radeon HD 5450]
/0/100/3/0.1                 multimedia  Manhattan HDMI Audio [Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series]
/0/100/7                     bridge      5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 7
/0/100/14                    generic     5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub System Management Registers
/0/100/14.1                  generic     5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub GPIO and Scratch Pad Registers
/0/100/14.2                  generic     5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub Control Status and RAS Registers
/0/100/1a                    bus         82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4
/0/100/1a.1                  bus         82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5
/0/100/1a.2                  bus         82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6
/0/100/1a.7                  bus         82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2
/0/100/1b                    multimedia  82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller
/0/100/1c                    bridge      82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 1
/0/100/1c.5                  bridge      82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 6
/0/100/1c.5/0    eth1        network     NetXtreme BCM5761 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe
/0/100/1d                    bus         82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1
/0/100/1d.1                  bus         82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2
/0/100/1d.2                  bus         82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3
/0/100/1d.7                  bus         82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1
/0/100/1e                    bridge      82801 PCI Bridge
/0/100/1f                    bridge      82801JIR (ICH10R) LPC Interface Controller
/0/100/1f.2      scsi0       storage     82801JI (ICH10 Family) SATA AHCI Controller
/0/100/1f.2/0    /dev/sda    disk        250GB ST3250318AS
/0/100/1f.2/0/1  /dev/sda1   volume      101MiB Linux filesystem partition
/0/100/1f.2/0/2  /dev/sda2   volume      4102MiB Linux swap volume
/0/100/1f.2/0/3  /dev/sda3   volume      20GiB EXT4 volume
/0/100/1f.2/0/4  /dev/sda4   volume      208GiB EXT4 volume
/0/100/1f.2/1    /dev/sdb    disk        1500GB WDC WD15EARS-00M
/0/100/1f.2/1/1  /dev/sdb1   volume      499GiB Data partition
/0/100/1f.2/1/2  /dev/sdb2   volume      897GiB Data partition
/0/100/1f.2/2    /dev/cdrom  disk        DVD-ROM TS-H353C
/0/100/1f.2/3    /dev/cdrw   disk        DVD+-RW TS-H653F
/0/100/1f.2/3/0  /dev/cdrw   disk        
/0/100/1f.3                  bus         82801JI (ICH10 Family) SMBus Controller

Agere ET1310/ET131x drivers for Windows

Matthieu — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:46:35 +0000

I bought a cheap Agere Gigabit Ethernet ExpressCard. The CD that came with it included some Windows XP drivers, but Windows 7 32 and 64-bit drivers were impossible to find anywhere but on Windows Update.

Fortunately, the Targa Traveller 1720 ML42 has this NIC built in, so the drivers were available on http://www.service.targa.co.uk/. I have extracted the drivers for XP32, 7 32 and 7 64, download below.

Agere ET131x.7z

Netgear WNDA3100v1 driver only

Matthieu — Tue, 25 May 2010 04:33:17 +0000

The Netgear WNDA3100 is a pretty nice wireless adapter, but the drivers from Netgear are bundled with a crappy management software. I extracted the basic driver files from the .exe provided so that I can install the hardware using the Windows standard methods.

The 7z contains the Windows XP/2003 and Vista/7 drivers.

WNDA3100v1 Driver

Matthieu | Blog » driver

3 monitors and Updated xorg mesa drivers for Ubuntu Natty

Agere ET1310/ET131x drivers for Windows

Netgear WNDA3100v1 driver only