Which distro on "legacy" Toshiba A210-12U

[jeztastic]

Hi,

I imagine this is a pretty dull question on these fora, but my situation is a little different. I've been using ubuntu for ages now, but I am a bit buggered by the lack of support for some of my hardware. Specifically the ATI Radeon® X1200 video card. ATI no longer supports the card, and the drivers are no longer compatible with Ubuntu (9.04 onwards).

This means I am stuck with 8.10, which incidentally I have still not managed to get working to my satisfaction with this graphics card. 8:10 still has Firefox 3.0 and OpenOffice 2, and I am fed up with struggling to upgrade everything to keep it current.

So, can anyone recommend a distro (preferably debian based with gnome) with rock solid graphics for legacy ATI (the driver is FGLRX) and up to date on the latest application packages?

Much obliged!

Jez

[rokytnji]

All I could find was this for your model Laptop. You might consider a Alternative to Debian Based Distros and go with something like Slackware, Gentoo, Arch, or Puppy instead. Sorry I can't be of more help to ya.

linux on Toshiba A210-12U - Google Search

[Rubberman]

If you are up to some serious futzing, you might try Gentoo.

[jeztastic]

If you are up to some serious futzing, you might try Gentoo.

Any particular reason?

[Rubberman]

Gentoo is basically installed/built from scratch. You tell it what hardware you have and what options you want and it builds the system from source. That's what I meant about futzing with it. If something doesn't work quite right, you can usually change some options or build flags and try again. It used to take me about a week to tweak the system for new computer hardware, but once I was done, it worked great. I had some old ATI video hardware on one system and it was able to deal with it just fine. However, I had to know exactly what board and amount of video memory it had in order to get it configured properly.