While studying for some upcoming re-examinations, I installed Kanotix' linux kernel 2.6.13 on my laptop, and removed Lilo in favour of Grub. The kernel was already running fine at my desktop, but laptops are, well, tricky. At first my Centrino based wifi card wouldn't work [ipw2200 chipset]. Turned out I needed to download the latest firmware from the module's website and unpack it to /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/ . Besides that, I needed both the ipw2200 .deb and the ieee80211 one from the Kanotix driver package.

So, now I could upgrade the ATI Radeon driver [was getting a tad dated], for which apparantly the kernel source where still needed [grab the install-kernel-source-vanilla.sh from the script page, along with the install-radeon-debian.sh or install-nvidia-debian.sh script]. Downloaded the kernel sources through that nice script [needed to comment out the untarring of an old patch, adm8211, otherwise the script would fail], then installed the fglrx driver through install-radeon-debian.sh. Logged into X again and ran glxgears, the default benchmark.

My mouth felt open. Instead of the 1410 frames per second I first got with my Mobility Radeon 9700 featuring 64MiB of RAM, I now get 2210 frames per second! Talking about better drivers :) /me is happy.

OK, back to studying.