[arch-announce] ATI catalyst support dropped

[Recent News Updates]

As many of you may have noticed, support for the catalyst ATI Linux driver, has been moved to the AUR (Arch Linux User Repository). This was partly due to lack of motivation from the maintainer in charge of the package and lack of support from AMD to the general Linux ecosystem. AMD has been great to the Linux community, and they are constantly improving their support, but they have a long way to go in terms of general Linux distributions support. Officially supported options include the xf86-video-ati and the xf86-video-radeonhd drivers. Both are discussed in the Arch Linux Wiki (search for ATI). Both drivers are high quality, and are constantly improving. I suggest the xf86-video-ati driver as it has been updated more frequently than xf86-video-radeonhd. The catalyst and catalyst-utils packages now reside in AUR, where they have been adopted by user “draje”. He has updated the package to the 9.4 version that was given to Ubuntu for the release of xorg-server 1.6. These drivers therefore explicitly depend on xorg-server 1.6 from [testing] -- it will soon be transferred to [extra]. Sorry for any inconveniences this may cause you. We do not want to hold xorg-server 1.6 in testing any longer solely because of a closed source driver.

URL: http://www.archlinux.org/news/439/