[ Solved]Linux Mint 17.2 Cinnamon graphic problem with AMD

[deepakdeshp]

Hi,
I installed Mint 17.2 Cinnamon 64 bits on my HP laptop with AMD A8 7410 APU. But the on board graphics is not supported and the system is very slow. sure if the I am using it as a dual boot with Windows 8.1. This is the first time I have tried Mint on this laptop. I tried Ubuntu 15.01 and it works perfectly

Any suggestions will be most welcome. Thank you in advance.

[xenopeek]

I'm not too familiar with AMD's offerings but I'm assuming APU means it is a CPU with an integrated graphics chip. Cinnamon, like Gnome Shell, requires your graphics card and its driver are capable of hardware accelerated 3D animation. There are two alternatives you may try:
1> Use a less demanding desktop environment, like found on Linux Mint MATE and Xfce editions. Those will work fine with dodgy graphics cards or dodgy drivers.
2> Install a different driver for the graphics card, hoping it will improve the situation (it doesn't always). You can check in Driver Manager if there are any other drivers available.

[exploder]

The 3.19 kernel combined with installing the proprietary drivers should greatly improve things. My laptop runs on an AMD E1 processor @ 1.2 GHZ with built in graphics with this combination and Cinnamon performs just fine on it.

[deepakdeshp]

I am not sure if the problem is graphic manger problem or something else. Will any log files help to diagnose the problem or is there any other method?

1> Use a less demanding desktop environment, like found on Linux Mint MATE and Xfce editions. Those will work fine with dodgy graphics cards or dodgy drivers.

In that case will I need to download Mint MATE and Xfce editions? Or is there any way to change the desktop of my Cinnamon install?

Install a different driver for the graphics card, hoping it will improve the situation (it doesn't always). You can check in Driver Manager if there are any other drivers available.

There are other driver managers available , Trying them did not help.

[JohnBobSmith]

Greetings deepakdeshp, and welcome to the forums!

Can you please enter this command in a terminal?

Code: Select all

inxi -SCG

You can then paste the output here in code tags. To use code tags, click the "Code" button and paste the text after the first closing bracket "]" but before the second opening bracket "[".

This will tell us more about your computer, including things like the current kernel and and graphics driver versions.

[deepakdeshp]

Greetings

Here is the code

Code: Select all

System:    Host: uma-HP-Notebook Kernel: 3.16.0-38-generic x86_64 (64 bit) 
           Desktop: Cinnamon 2.6.11  Distro: Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela
CPU:       Quad core AMD A8-7410 APU with AMD Radeon R5 Graphics (-MCP-) cache: 8192 KB flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 sse4a ssse3 svm) 
           Clock Speeds: 1: 1600.00 MHz 2: 2200.00 MHz 3: 1600.00 MHz 4: 1000.00 MHz
Graphics:  Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Mullins [Radeon APU A4-6000 with R2 Graphics] 
           X.Org: 1.15.1 drivers: ati,radeon (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: 1366x768@60.3hz 
           GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 3.4, 128 bits) GLX Version: 2.1 Mesa 10.1.3

[JohnBobSmith]

Ah yes, R5 graphics will run slow on an older kernel that may not support the hardware well. As exploder mentions,

The 3.19 kernel combined with installing the proprietary drivers should greatly improve things.

. You may wish to read THIS guide on how to upgrade the kernel painlessly, or use the update manager's view > kernels and install the 3.19 kernel that way. Be warned, this may completely ruin your system. As such, make sure you have:
-A rescue disc/USB (What you used to install Mint to your laptop)
-A backup of anything you want to keep

And I take no responsibility if things go wrong. As exploder also mentioned, upgrading to AMD's proprietary drivers *AFTER* updating the kernel should also speed things up. Finally, it appears you are running discrete and integrated graphics, as such THIS tutorial on Ubuntu's forums may help as well.

Let us know how things go. Best of luck!

[Hendrick]

You might want to try to change the video driver. That greatly improved the speed of my HP laptop.
Just run the Driver Manager en choose the second best driver (fgirx-updates).

Hendrick / Amsterdam

[deepakdeshp]

Ah yes, R5 graphics will run slow on an older kernel that may not support the hardware well. As exploder mentions,

The 3.19 kernel combined with installing the proprietary drivers should greatly improve things.

. You may wish to read THIS guide on how to upgrade the kernel painlessly, or use the update manager's view > kernels and install the 3.19 kernel that way.

I installed the 3.19 kernel but it did not help and there is no improvement. Fortunately the system did not crash after installing the 3.19 Kernel
I am also not able to choose alternative video driver. When I try choosing an alternate driver it hangs and just will not let me choose alternative driver.
Looks like this hardware is not supported by Cinnamon Mint and there is no way out .

[El Zoido]

For what it's worth, I'm getting terribad performance on Mint 17.2 with an AMD GPU (HD 7850) as well.
I've made a topic about it a few days ago, you can currently find it a little down. No answers there yet, though.

Not sure what's behind it, but I've pretty much exhausted the "easy" options now and consider switching away from Mint on this system. Or at least from Cinnamon, maybe another desktop environment will run better...

[deepakdeshp]

For what it's worth, I'm getting terribad performance on Mint 17.2 with an AMD GPU (HD 7850) as well.
I've made a topic about it a few days ago, you can currently find it a little down. No answers there yet, though.

Not sure what's behind it, but I've pretty much exhausted the "easy" options now and consider switching away from Mint on this system. Or at least from Cinnamon, maybe another desktop environment will run better...

Looks like some other variant of apart from Mint has be tried Or we have to try Ubuntu

[El Zoido]

Maybe I'm going to give Kubuntu a try, wasn't a big fan of KDE when I last used it, but wanted to check out how they have done.

[deepakdeshp]

Maybe I'm going to give Kubuntu a try, wasn't a big fan of KDE when I last used it, but wanted to check out how they have done.

I tried Ubuntu 15.04 , latest version . It works perfectly as far as graphics is considered. Mint is based on Ubuntu but the graphics is not supported for this AMD chip in Mint . It works well in Ubuntu 15,04. I wonder why is it so.

[deepakdeshp]

I upgraded to Linux Kernel and used alternative driver for graphics.
It is working perfectly now. Kernel version 4.0.5-040005-generic . Thank you all for the suggestions .