I'm about to purchase a laptop with this graphics card (cheap deal) but I read that ATI cards have issues or may even not work with Natty. Is this true? Is there a way to fix the eventual problem? Are proprietary drivers needed or the included drivers will do fine? Thanks a lot for your advice, if I get the laptop and can't run Unity, it would be pretty much a waste of money to me.
SnapOverflow
I am typing this on a laptop with a mobility radeon 4200. It is an AMD Nile chipset, and as of Natty, everything except wireless works out of the box. I had to upgrade to a kernel-ppa for 2.6.39, and then that also worked out of the box. in 2.6.39, unfortunately, the proprietary drivers do not seem to install. The open source drivers for the graphics card work, though at reduced performance and higher operating temperature. When I play Minecraft, it gets uncomfortably hot. I got an auxillary (25$) USB external cooler (two fans) for my laptop which has solved the problem for me for now. I hope that oneiric will either work with the proprietary drivers, or have much improved open ones. My laptop is 11.6 inches, very compact. This cooling problem will likely not affect larger formats. Anyways, with some caveats, it works.