On Tuesday 16 June 2009 06:10:56 Thomas Bächler wrote:
David C. Rankin schrieb:
Your alternative is to use the radeonhd driver. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe your card is supported. The radeonhd driver is really making progress and is a very good open-Source driver. I use it with laptop running Arch. Heat is a bit of a problem on my laptop, but for a desktop you won't notice any difference aside from a degree or two on case temperature rise. In the tiny space inside a laptop -- the difference is about 20 degrees F.
You could also use the radeon driver from the xf86-video-ati package, it should support everything radeonhd supports (maybe with some delay, but then radeonhd has longer release cycles, so the xorg one might still be faster).
Another note about fglrx/catalyst: We used to support this driver but it was a real mess and ultimately, nobody wanted to do it anymore. The problem is that ATI doesn't simply support the latest Xorg and kernel versions like nvidia does, but only the latest versions of some distributions. Therefore when a new kernel or xorg-server was released, we had to wait until any of the "supported" distributions used it, ATI wouldn't bother making the driver compatible before that. That was really slowing Arch down, so we dropped it. Ultimately, the radeonhd and radeon drivers should support all of the card's features, now that ATI is releasing specs.
Oh I know the pain quite well. Beginning in October 2007 I worked closely with the SuSE ATI rep (Stefan Dirsch at the time) and an ATI rep, Luugi Marsan, on SONAME problems with ATI's libGL just to get a driver that would install on openSuSE. It took 4 driver releases 8.40-8.44 to get the problem fixed so users were not having to manually change libraries and links just to get the driver to work. (See: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=344135) and the others. At one point I was even competent at extracting the ATI driver package contents to modify it to work on my system. I know what a mess it can be. Getting it to work with Arch is far beyond my arch-proficiency (heck, I'm still struggling with kde4). However, it is well worth the effort from a distribution standpoint. Being able to offer a working fglrx driver and nvidia driver is the gold standard among distributions but does take a lot of man- power and resources. That's why there are only a handful that have the resources to do it. It takes a dedicated team of a few people just to keep up with the changes. Compounding the present situation is the ATI dropping of support for "legacy cards" without a good driver in place. The root of the problem was/is ATI's attempt to make a "one size fits all" mega driver package that covered all Xorg versions and all ATI cards. When that occurred in October 08, the driver just went to hell. Now you have (1) the 8-9 driver that is a damn good driver and supports all cards up to the x1800 and up to xorg 7.3; (2) the 9-3 driver that supports all cards up to the 3000 series and xorg 7.4, but is broken for a large number of the cards in the x800 - x1800 range; (3) you have the 9-6, which is the ONLY driver still developed by ATI and that driver that does NOT support any pre-2400 series cards (no support for the common 9100, 9200-9550, 9600, 9700, 9800, x800, x850, x1050, x1200, x1300, x1600, x1650, x1800, x1900, x1950, etc...) In other words the ATI Series 300-500 architecture cards. What needs to happen for Linux in general is for someone to package a working ATI-Legacy driver that supports Series 300-500 cards for the current xorg, and then the ATI-Current package for the current 2400+ series of cards. (Series 600 Architecture) I know that is pie-in-the-sky thinking, but that is what needs to happen to put ATI support on par with NVidia Linux support. As you say, it is ATI that needs to step up to the plate and put out a workable package because the state of the current ATI driver package is 83 Megabytes of convoluted crap for linux distributions to try and deal with. Maybe Baho can do it? ;-) -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com