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I recently install Debian 8 with LXDE on my 2005 Powerbook 15" 1.67GHz with a Mobility Radeon 9600 PRO Turbo graphics card.

0000:00:10.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV350/M10 [Mobility Radeon 9600 PRO Turbo]

It works really well but it can't show video at all and the graphics are really slow.

I have tried installing linux-firmware-nonfree but his leads to the computer freezing after a few seconds, leaving just enough time to purge it again and get it working.

Is there another way of getting hardware acceleration on these machines?

This problem may be related to the freezing of Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and Lubuntu 16.04 which I experienced when trying them out prior to installation. Ubuntu 12.04 and Mac OSX 10.5.8 both worked fine on this machine.

I just wanted to try something that was still getting updates.

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  • What's the graphics card in that thing? – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Feb 26 '17 at 23:50
  • Its a Mobility Radeon 9600 PRO Turbo. – Simon Baldwin Feb 27 '17 at 11:13
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    Strange, the free driver (radeon) has supported the 9600PRO for ages. Maybe the Mobility 9600 PRO Turbo is a completely different chip sold under a similar brand name. What's the output of lspci | grep VGA ? – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Feb 27 '17 at 12:15
  • 0000:00:10.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV350/M10 [Mobility Radeon 9600 PRO Turbo] – Simon Baldwin Feb 27 '17 at 17:27
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The answer to this was simply to add

radeon.agpmode=-1

as a boot parameter as suggested in the Ubuntu PowerPc FAQs. It solved all freezing problems, it seems obvious now and I don't know why I didn't try it in the first place!

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