I had a Tosh Sat (Pro?) with ATI Xpress 200M graphics, and I concluded it wasn't a real Radeon. I had a couple of Radeons on the desktop before that laptop, and so had expectations that fell down. Maybe some other Radeon branded stuff was similar?
The laptop came with XP Home, but XP was too hand-holding, Fisher-Price, bloated, etc., and I wanted to stick with 2000. Could not get the ATI driver or Toshiba package to work under 2000. I think I had a got at inf hacking, but perhaps simply never got that right.
Installed the MSDN copy of XP Pro from work, and IIRC still had to use the Toshiba driver for the X200M: reference ATI drivers were plain incompatible.
Linux was the same kind of limited driver support nonsense.
ATI provided a binary blob driver for the X200M, but their driver only worked with up-to a certain version of kernel. ATI never released another driver with X200M support. All I could do was manually compile the highest possible kernel compatible, and otherwise never update the kernel. And in turn, whole distro on top. No new OS until a new laptop, many years later.
At the time hardware acceleration was not in the radeon module, and the kernel driver was just too slow. And, because the X200M wasn't a real radeon, I think what features the kernel supported might not have been implemented on this mock-radeon.
The laptop wasn't all crap. Had TV out and so P2P2TV worked nice 😀 Also was a PIII-based celeron just when Apple moved to Intel, and it could be used as a Hackintosh. Also was the period of Ubuntu breaking something at every 6 month update. It had a quad boot at one point, for sure. Phone on USB and even could do mobile internet!
Oh, and I learned do not use binary drivers on Linux. You end up at the whims of publishers, and that, IMHO, is the crux of the problem with proprietary vendors.
