Graphics adapter (ATI X700) and LCD display
Etch/Xorg 6.8.0: My display is running fine with the Xorg "ati" driver in 1600x1050 now. The BIOS battery charge icon (when Fn-F2 is pressed) appears cleanly in the upper left screen corner (I have seen negative reports on this for Samsung notebooks). Peformance is ok (glxgears reports 84 Frames/s at 1000x1000 window size).
Here are is relevant modeline from Xorg.log.0:
# Mode "1680x1050": 119.2 MHz (scaled from 0.0 MHz), 64.8 kHz, 59.1 Hz Modeline "1680x1050" 119.25 1680 1728 1760 1840 1050 1052 1058 1096
Etch/Xorg 6.8.0/ATI proprietary fglrx driver: I followed the procedure outlined by Flavio Stanchina, replacing the ATI packages by the more recent package 8.18.6. Unfortunately, opening the "TV out" panel in the QT control application locked my laptop hard. With that exception, the driver has been stable so far.
Update 2005/11/08: there are a number of issues with the fglrx driver. The 8.16 drivers are unable to get the 16:9 resolutions on X50 notebooks right (important for Ubuntu "Breezy" users who will have these preinstalled). For 2.6.14, a patch is needed that Flavio's 8.18.6 packages already include (get rid of the verify_area() function call). The 8.18.6 driver reports incorrect screen dimensions to clients, leading e.g. to wrong aspect ratio in video playback applications. Must be fixed by putting the line
DisplaySize 330 208
into the Monitor section in xorg.conf. The Rage3d forum has a lot of interesting information on the ATI driver.
Sarge/XFree86 4.3: Initially I was unable to run XFree86 in the native 1680x1050 resolution of the X50 LCD panel. I tried to hardcode th differnet modelines I found on the web but with no success. The VBE/DDC monitor detection of the vesa driver failed:
Good news: The above modeline from Xorg works on Sarge with the VESA driver.