Linux radeon video problems on Dell 2007WFP on DVI

I got a new work computer and instantly installed Kubuntu 9.10 x64 on it. I then proceeded to install the ATI drivers for the video card, an ATI Radeon HD 4350. I used the 10.1 Catalyst drivers and was not impressed. Xorg.conf constantly using 50% of one CPU, bad performance resizing and dragging windows, etc. Tried to upgrade to the 10.2 Catalyst and then KDE wouldn't even start up.

So I decide to return to the open source Radeon driver and ran into some problems in doing so. First I googled purging fglrx from my system and followed those instructions.

Next, I rebooted and got cloned screens. xrandr fixed that for me pretty quickly, but then I had weird video effects on my DVI monitor, a Dell 2007WPF. xrandr -q told me that it was running at 59.9hz, which is not the native resolution; the monitor wants 60hz

Here's how I fixed it.

1. Run cvt to generate timings for the monitor.

cvt 1680 1050 60

2. Create a new mode using the resulting timings passed to xrandr

xrandr --output DVI-0 --newmode dvi-calculated 146.25 1680 1784 1960 2240 1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync

Note - The '--output DVI-0' is apparently ignored, resulting in the need for the following line.

3. Associate the new mode to the output using xrandr

xrandr --addmode DVI-0 dvi-calculated

4. Activate the new mode on the output using xrandr

xrandr --output DVI-0 --mode dvi-native

5. For me it didn't fix the problem. I actually had to switch to a different resolution mode, then back to the new mode I had created

xrandr --output DVI-0 --mode 1024x768
xrandr --output DVI-0 --mode dvi-calculated

And my artifacts were gone. I'm not sure if these configuration items will survive a reboot or not.