Just installed F17 on old HP laptop and graphics look quite bad

[ready]

I was running CentOS 6.2 just fine on my old HP dv5117 laptop, and the graphics looked good. But now on F17 everything looks off, the screen resolution is bad (I tried changing it), and I'm not sure what to try next. Do I need some kind of drivers?

Doing a "lspci | grep VGA" I get "VGA Compatible Controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE)". Is there any other information I could provide about my video card that might help determine what I should do?

When I look at one of the detail screens it says my graphics is "Gallium 0.4 on ATI RS480".

(Also, I'm not sure how the installation even worked, because I accidentally used a 64bit DVD and my old laptop is only 32bit, but the whole installation worked fine. That's surprising to me, I thought that wasn't possible.)

Thanks for any help you can provide.

---------- Post added at 09:22 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:04 PM ----------

As an update, I tried installing the following Catalyst driver from the AMD website but got errors during installation. http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownloa...5&lang=English

[BBQdave]

Originally Posted by ready

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Might want to try a fresh install of F16 Xfce (32-bit) or Linux Mint 13 - MATE (32-bit)
3D video acceleration not needed with these distros

[hadrons123]

Originally Posted by ready

I was running CentOS 6.2 just fine on my old HP dv5117 laptop, and the graphics looked good. But now on F17 everything looks off, the screen resolution is bad (I tried changing it), and I'm not sure what to try next. Do I need some kind of drivers?

Doing a "lspci | grep VGA" I get "VGA Compatible Controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE)". Is there any other information I could provide about my video card that might help determine what I should do?

When I look at one of the detail screens it says my graphics is "Gallium 0.4 on ATI RS480".

(Also, I'm not sure how the installation even worked, because I accidentally used a 64bit DVD and my old laptop is only 32bit, but the whole installation worked fine. That's surprising to me, I thought that wasn't possible.)

Thanks for any help you can provide.

---------- Post added at 09:22 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:04 PM ----------

As an update, I tried installing the following Catalyst driver from the AMD website but got errors during installation. http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownloa...5&lang=English

tell us what is your normal screen resolution and how much does fedora give you?

Catalyst driver support for your card ended years ago.

[ready]

Originally Posted by BBQdave

Might want to try a fresh install of F16 Xfce (32-bit) or Linux Mint 13 - MATE (32-bit)
3D video acceleration not needed with these distros

Isn't it more than 3D that's a problem, as everything looks bad in regular usage rather than some advanced 3D graphics like video games or something. (Perhaps I've misunderstood.) Would F17 Xfce do the trick as well?

Originally Posted by hadrons123

tell us what is your normal screen resolution and how much does fedora give you?

Catalyst driver support for your card ended years ago.

I'm not sure what the normal screen resolution is, would you know how I could find out? It's a 15.4" monitor, and the resolution in the display settings shows as 1200x800.