[arch-general] New 64 bit computer

[David C. Rankin]

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
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www.rankinlawfirm.com