On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 02:57 +0300, Grigorios Bouzakis wrote:

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 2:52 AM, Baho Utot wrote:

...

I am gathering info on this new system

I just bought a new computer ($550USD complete) as I wanted to go 64 bit

Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P motherboard AMD Phenom II X4 810 AM3 socket 2.6G 8GB High performance DDR3 ram Radeon HD 4670

Will arch 64 install and run on this? With little trouble? :)

I am concerned with the ATI video card, Any problems with this card?

What can I expect running Arch 64 on the system?

Now I can make many more errors only twice as fast :)

Yes Arch Linux 64 will run just fine. Any chance you will do [community] after [extra] ? Or you are not interested with it? I bet half of the packages fail to build there. :)

Oh hell yes.....I am up for it if you are ;) Thanks

On Mon, 2009-06-15 at 23:21 -0500, David C. Rankin wrote:

Baho Utot wrote:

...

I am gathering info on this new system

I just bought a new computer ($550USD complete) as I wanted to go 64 bit

Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P motherboard AMD Phenom II X4 810 AM3 socket 2.6G 8GB High performance DDR3 ram Radeon HD 4670

Will arch 64 install and run on this? With little trouble? :)

I am concerned with the ATI video card, Any problems with this card?

What can I expect running Arch 64 on the system?

Now I can make many more errors only twice as fast :)

Baho,

Arch will run quite nicely with the box (very quickly I might add). Your problem, as you have already identified, may be the ATI card. To get optimal performance out of your graphics subsystem, you will need to run ATI's proprietary fglrx driver. The proprietary driver is not only better from a performance standpoint, but also has cooling advantages as well. (selective powerdown of unused portions of the graphics chipset) On a desktop, the cooling issues are not as acute as with a laptop, but it is still something to consider.

Here is the rub. Currently while your new graphics card is a card supported by the ATI Linux driver -- Arch isn't. (ATI should support Arch -- but nobody has kissed ATI in the right place yet) The ATI Linux driver supports the following distros:

Debian Fedora Mandriva RedFlag (where the heck did this come from??) RedHat Slackware SuSE Ubuntu

Unless you run one of the above, the chances are very slim that you can make use of the ATI driver :-(

** However, from your posts, you do seem quite gifted working with packages, you just might want to download the ATI Linux driver (released today):

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver...

You can extract the contents of the package with:

sh ati-driver-installer-9-6-x86.x86_64.run --extract

and then take a look to see what changes would be required to make it work with Arch. (That's just a bit beyond my cup of tea).

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.

With the horsepower your new box has, your performance will be fine. Just make sure if you use the radeonhd driver, you read up on using EXA acceleration instead of XAA acceleration. For my laptop, it really helped.

I have a standard solution I now employ with all ATI desktop graphics cards that really works well. Open the case, remove the retaining screw for the card, remove the card, and then put an NVidia card in its place just a fast as you can. You can use the ATI card for target practice or a paper weight thereafter. With that done, you no longer run the risk of getting screwed over by ATI dropping Linux support for your card just like the millions of other ATI users that just got screwed in March ;-)

No thanks on the nvidia... I like AMD and ATI. I'll see what I can do to make it work Thanks for the info

On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 11:09 -0500, David C. Rankin wrote:

What I am pissed at AMD/ATI for is dropping all Linux driver support for all cards sold before 2007 (Everything before the 2400 series). This screwed a lot of loyal ATI users over and left a real bad taste in my mouth. Think about all the 9600, 9700, 9800, x800, x850, x1600, x1650, and x1800 ATI cards (many recently sold) where the users are just screwed. (9.3 was the "last" driver release for these cards and for "many", the 9.3 driver is broken)

Instead of being pissed at them, you should love them for releasing specifications about these cards so open source drivers can support them better. The current code living in git for xf86-video-ati and mesa has improved a lot, and powermanagement is also supported. In the end, you'll be better off with the open source drivers than any fglrx driver that ever supported your card.

David C. Rankin wrote:

What I am pissed at AMD/ATI for is dropping all Linux driver support for all cards sold before 2007 (Everything before the 2400 series). This screwed a lot of loyal ATI users over and left a real bad taste in my mouth.

Forgive me if I'm ignorant on the specifics of the topic. But in theory shouldn't older model hardware drivers already be fully integrated into the kernel (and supported by kernel developers), thereby making such a move a non-issue? DR

On Tuesday 16 June 2009 12:12:15 David Rosenstrauch wrote:

David C. Rankin wrote:

...

What I am pissed at AMD/ATI for is dropping all Linux driver support for all cards sold before 2007 (Everything before the 2400 series). This screwed a lot of loyal ATI users over and left a real bad taste in my mouth.

Forgive me if I'm ignorant on the specifics of the topic. But in theory shouldn't older model hardware drivers already be fully integrated into the kernel (and supported by kernel developers), thereby making such a move a non-issue?

DR

One would think, but NO. The entire problem, the short version, is that with the introduction of support for the 2400 series card support and support for xorg 7.4 which occurred with the 8-10 driver (October 2008) release, ATI broke support for a number of X1200 and earlier cards. (little things like your machine reboots on driver load, etc..) For many if the driver would load, performance of the 8-10 through 9-3 drivers was roughly 50% of performance with the 8-9 release (September -- you get the release numbers...) In either late Feb or early March 2009, ATI announced it was washing it hands of support for all newly termed "Legacy" cards. This announcement was made not more than a few weeks before the 9-3 release. With the 9-3 release, it was quickly confirmed that problem ATI introduced with the 8-10 release had not been fixed and at that point in time all owners of pre-series 2400 cards were just hosed if their hardware had problems with the 8-10 to 9-3 drivers. Biggest problem - no upgrade path to Xorg 7.4. The 8-9 driver is not compatible with the new xorg. So all ATI owners of "Legacy" cards were left without a workable ATI driver with the only option of reverting to the radeon/radeonhd driver. (I'm not knocking the radeonhd driver, Matthias, Yang, Rafal and the rest of the really smart guys working on the driver are all doing Excellent work with it, but it is not there yet for laptop users) For desktop users with plenty of power, like in Baho's case, it isn't an issue. For laptop owners it is a huge issue. The fglrx driver incorporates downclocking and selective powerdown of unused portions of the graphics chipset so heat is managed well. This can make a 20 degree + difference in case temps and that is the difference between a laptop or a nut-cooker. So while one would normally think that a driver (and Graphics card company for that matter) would maintain backward compatibility with earlier cards, ATI just drew a line in the sand and as of March 2009 said "We will no longer release drivers for pre 2400 series cards, if the current Linux driver is still broken for your earlier card -- F.0." And, that is exactly what ATI did.... (Trust me -- this IS the short version;-) -- 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

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.

I have to agree, ATI is big no no if you want a decent workstation setup. I've tried a whole lot to use ATI instead of Nvidia but it just never pans out. I've wasted a lot of money and a whole lot of time on ATI cards and just end up ripping the card out and putting in an Nvidia one. I don't even use my computers for gaming, that is not the issue at all with the video card. I just want something stable that just works. I've researched what to buy as far as what is well supported, tried both the free radeon and radeonhd drivers, and tried the proprietery fglrx ones many times and really tried to come up with working solutions. If you don't need X, than an ATI card will be fine. Going Nvidia might not be the most "idealistic" route, but it is by far the least amount of hassle in my opinion. On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Ricardo Hernandez wrote:

ATI noooooo!!! hehe. As commented above i'm almost 100% sure you'll have troubles. At least in my case, ATI 4850, i cannot use X at all. ATI has no support for kernel 2.6.29 yet and arch have a patch for that but it does not work for some card, for example my card. Xorg didn't recognize mi card even with the fglrx driver.

Sooo...my recomendation, again as above, buy nvidia. I read you don't like nvidia but is a more serious company at least in support and driver updates.

I sell mi ati card and buy a XFX 9800 GT. Is a little less power but it works a lot better and have no problem.

However if you don't mind 3d acceleration for the moment, the radeonhd drivers is a good alternative, and it seems that in kernel 2.6.31 i'll have KMS support.

-- Ricardo Hernández ( richerVE )

David, indeed old ati card are well supported, new ati card are almost no supported. 2009/6/17 David Rosenstrauch

Are you referring to old ATI cards? Or new ones?

Dunno ... I've used a number of ATI cards, and haven't had problems. I'm currently using a laptop with a ATI Mobility Radeon 9000, and a desktop/server with a ATI Radeon 9200 SE - both without incident.

DR

Dwight Schauer wrote:

...

I have to agree, ATI is big no no if you want a decent workstation setup. I've tried a whole lot to use ATI instead of Nvidia but it just never pans out. I've wasted a lot of money and a whole lot of time on ATI cards and just end up ripping the card out and putting in an Nvidia one. I don't even use my computers for gaming, that is not the issue at all with the video card. I just want something stable that just works. I've researched what to buy as far as what is well supported, tried both the free radeon and radeonhd drivers, and tried the proprietery fglrx ones many times and really tried to come up with working solutions. If you don't need X, than an ATI card will be fine. Going Nvidia might not be the most "idealistic" route, but it is by far the least amount of hassle in my opinion.

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Ricardo Hernandez wrote:

...

ATI noooooo!!! hehe. As commented above i'm almost 100% sure you'll have troubles. At least in my case, ATI 4850, i cannot use X at all. ATI has no support for kernel 2.6.29 yet and arch have a patch for that but it does not work for some card, for example my card. Xorg didn't recognize mi card even with the fglrx driver.

Sooo...my recomendation, again as above, buy nvidia. I read you don't like nvidia but is a more serious company at least in support and driver updates.

I sell mi ati card and buy a XFX 9800 GT. Is a little less power but it works a lot better and have no problem.

However if you don't mind 3d acceleration for the moment, the radeonhd drivers is a good alternative, and it seems that in kernel 2.6.31 i'll have KMS support.

-- Ricardo Hernández ( richerVE )

-- Ricardo Hernández ( richerVE )

Both old and new ones. Most of the problems I've ran into are with dual monitor setups that use compiz. I've so much wanted to go with and opensource driver solution, but I've wasted too much time/money researching trying. So no more. Maybe in a year of two the nouveau drivers will have matured. Last I checked on my setups I still had issues. If I was content with one monitor and no compiz, then an ATI card "might" be alright using an opensource driver, as the proprietry ones are too buggy in my opinion. But I've been been too much at this proint by time/money wasted on trying to go the ATI route. On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 10:22 AM, David Rosenstrauch wrote:

Are you referring to old ATI cards?  Or new ones?

Dunno ... I've used a number of ATI cards, and haven't had problems. I'm currently using a laptop with a ATI Mobility Radeon 9000, and a desktop/server with a ATI Radeon 9200 SE - both without incident.

DR

Dwight Schauer wrote:

...

I have to agree, ATI is big no no if you want a decent workstation setup. I've tried a whole lot to use ATI instead of Nvidia but it just never pans out. I've wasted a lot of money and a whole lot of time on ATI cards and just end up ripping the card out and putting in an Nvidia one. I don't even use my computers for gaming, that is not the issue at all with the video card. I just want something stable that just works. I've researched what to buy as far as what is well supported, tried both the free radeon and radeonhd drivers, and tried the proprietery fglrx ones many times and really tried to come up with working solutions. If you don't need X, than an ATI card will be fine. Going Nvidia might not be the most "idealistic" route, but it is by far the least amount of hassle in my opinion.

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Ricardo Hernandez wrote:

...

ATI noooooo!!! hehe. As commented above i'm almost 100% sure you'll have troubles. At least in my case, ATI 4850, i cannot use X at all. ATI has no support for kernel 2.6.29 yet and arch have a patch for that but it does not work for some card, for example my card. Xorg didn't recognize mi card even with the fglrx driver.

Sooo...my recomendation, again as above, buy nvidia. I read you don't like nvidia but is a more serious company at least in support and driver updates.

I sell mi ati card and buy a XFX 9800 GT. Is a little less power but it works a lot better and have no problem.

However if you don't mind 3d acceleration for the moment, the radeonhd drivers is a good alternative, and it seems that in kernel 2.6.31 i'll have KMS support.

-- Ricardo Hernández ( richerVE )

From the article: "Once installing the patched Radeon driver, it immediately began working with our Diamond Radeon HD 4850 (identified as a Wekiva RV770 B50102 Board through AtomBIOS). Granted, of course,

Did you read the whole article? It may have been working, but not without some issues. It other words, it was not working 100%, it still had some things lacking. there is no 2D or 3D acceleration yet for the Radeon HD 4800 series. Once the R600 series has 2D/3D support, it should be easily ported to the RV770. The only other issue we have run into is the driver not being able to read the EDID information from the monitor. We have tried with multiple monitors and with all of them reading the EDID had failed, which resulted in the X server defaulting to 1280 x 768." Also see: http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature My workstation at where I work had a newer ATI card in it. I could not use with the free driver in any combination due to the card having Display Port instead of DVI, so I had to go with the proprietary driver. Once support for the proprietary driver was dropped and having the old one stop working due to kernel and Xorg updates I finally just pulled it out and put in and Nvidia card. Every computer I've worked with over the past several years that had an ATI card it in I ended up replacing with an Nvidia card due to one issue or another (not being able to realiable watch movies, run compiz, connect more than one monitor, whatever). With ATI I'd have the setup working for a while, the some other update would come along and break it. I wish it were not that way. I'd rather have all opensoruce drivers in the the computers I use. When it comes to video cards, that just is not a reality yet for me. Well, 1 current exception. My laptop has an intel video chipset and I've had not any major problems with it using the free Xorg drivers, even with 3D stuff or compiz. On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 4:37 PM, Antony Jepson wrote:

On 2009-06-17, Ricardo Hernandez wrote:

...

ATI noooooo!!! hehe. As commented above i'm almost 100% sure you'll have troubles. At least in my case, ATI 4850, i cannot use X at all. ATI has no support for kernel 2.6.29 yet and arch have a patch for that but it does not work for some card, for example my card. Xorg didn't recognize mi card even with the fglrx driver.

According to Phoronix[1] the ATI 4850 has worked with xf86-video-ati driver since day one.

[1]: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_rv770_oss&num=1

-- Sincerely,

Antony Jepson /   / GPG Key: 0xFA10ED80

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 alternative is to use the radeonhd git repository to pull the current development version for the radeonhd driver and drm. The build is simple and the development version provides a number of fixes for issues in the last release of the radeonhd driver and improvements in chip power control. If you want to use the radeonhd driver, I would use the driver from the git repository. See: http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd%3AINSTALL For Arch, all you need to do is install the drm modules(drm.ko/radeon.ko) and then build and install the radeonhd driver. There is also a radeonhd mailing list where you can help out. -- 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