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ATI Releases New Linux Drivers
dinivin writes "Today, ATI has released all new 2D/3D drivers for Linux/XFree86. The drivers will work on any "Built by ATI" Radeon 8500 or higher card (up to the 9700). Unlike the previous drivers from ATI, these support both the XVideo extension and S3TC (making UT2003 playable with these drivers)."
I wouldnt be the first to jump on an ATI driver. I will let others corrupt their x-windows before me, then download the fixed drivers when they come out! :)
No I didnt spell check this post...
Yay, more secret-ware for my Linux box. I think I'll stick to textmode.
maybe I wont need to use the Gatos drivers anymore... this would be very nice!
A.) There are no "Linux doesn't have any video card drivers" trolls.
B.) There are several commerical linux drivers written by the companies that make the hardware that are crap on Linux. I'll only say "good" if it has been successfully tested by many users.
Let's hope they got it right.
Reviews of the stablility and performance of these drivers will probably be a major factor in my decision on whether or not to buy a 9700. I've been hesitating because of all the bad things I hear about their drivers. I use NVidia now and I've never had a problem with the drivers, so I'm a little worried about switching.
Aw crap, ninjas!
Goodbye forever, windows, you won't be missed.
If I ever see a BSOD again, it will be too soon.
Will this driver work with any of the ATI OEM cards like the Sapphire Radeon series, etc? Has any tried it?
Does anyone know if this will work on PPC with Gentoo or Debian such as those Powerbooks that come with the mobility radeon 9000?
I bought a Radeon 9700 Pro a while back, and the only way I could run X with it was to use the VESA driver, which was SLOOOOW! I can finally go back to Gentoo as my primary OS! (Now if they would just release 1.4...)
What about Tux Racer? It's better than _anything_ on Windows. And it's non-violent, always a big plus. I had 16 guys over for a Tux Racer LAN party last weekend. The racing was awesome, as was all the anal sex.
Spoiled Linux punks.
Back in my day we had a galvanized metal box with a circuit board dangling in it. We had an old VT100 terminal hooked up, and we were happy!. In fact we were so poor we couldn't afford all the serial lines so we had to get by with just both data lines and the ground, but we were happy! None of that Fancy-Pants hardware control stuff that became popular among the Brylcreme'd University people at the time.
Did I mention that to get to this VT100 I had to walk 40 miles uphill kneedeep in snow? Both ways?
bah..
[/curmudgeon]
Trolling is a art,
This is absolutely wonderful for Linux 3D graphics. Depending on how well these drivers perform, gamers and graphics developers alike will have an alternative to NVidia.
The ATI drivers don't even need to outperform NVidia's. An ATI graphics card is almost always cheaper than the corresponding NVidia card. Some of us don't like spending any more of our own money on a computer than we have to.
Am I the only one who's had problems with some games crashing until this last batch of NVidia drivers came out. For that matter, the last batch didn't include an update for my GeForce2Go (stuck in OEM land), and it *still* crashes a lot.
sigs are a waste of space
RPM is nice and such, but please do like Nvidia, and provide a non RPM option ! I can get around this by using RPM and extracting the stuff, then making an ebuild or something, but hey, it is much easier if RPM is complemented by a tgz
life+universe+everything=42
Someone post a mirror or download site, they haven't updated their driver download page yet.
(And then other people mod it up!)
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
I wonder how hard it would be to get these working with the Gentoo UT2K3 live cd.... I mean in a lot of computer labs they have dells which have ATI cards and it would be a huge lan party for the price of a cdr and you wouldn't even have to bring much at all.... hmm I wonder....
So I'm still out of luck for getting my RADEON 64 DDR VIVO to work with Gigabyte GA-7XDR becuase it has a VIA chipset. Its really to bad they didn't release this driver for all RADEON cards. :(
Also, I'm wondering if this driver will work on any of the VIA chipset boards.. ATI has had some real troubles with this chipset..
UT 2003!
Linux Games!!
Tux Games!
Neverwinter Nights!
In your face you greasy little "Linux doesn't have any games" troll!
It is all well and good that they are putting out drivers that works "across the board" for their product line, but I have seen, time and again, where a "universal" device driver is not so universal after all. If it was written on a machine sporting an 8500, where does it degrade with the 9700 and so on? If they are not the same card, they won't be 100% compatible.
Another possibility is that the drivers are written to work generically with the chipset. This would have the distinction of having unremarkable drivers that do not push any card to its full potential.
My deep and sincere apologies to ATI if they are successful in making a universal driver for their stuff that actually takes full advantage of each device. I would bet that such a driver would be a real winner.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
The original drivers were for the professional FireGL 8800-type cards only. Then people figured out they could be made to work on the regular 8500 as well, and instead of putting the smack down decided to officially support it as well. Now these new drivers have xvideo and s3tc support so that desktop and gaming users will enjoy them a lot more, and work on 8500-9700 ATI cards. Keep up the good work, and don't forget DRI people too :)
Will NVIDIA's NV30 have linux drivers available?
Also does Creative have linux drivers for their Platinum Audigy 2?
thnx
-5q33z
Funny, how ATI wants to bring out cards to compete again Nvidia, but the one place they forgot to support was Linux.
I remember a time where ATI cards were better supported in Linux than Nvidia-based cards were.
Now, the tables have turned...
ATI is late coming to market with a set of drivers that will support Linux properly or even support a good chunk of the needed graphics APIs. Are you sure your not Matrox with the bad / late deliverance of OpenGL drivers to market?
This could cost them some potiential owners. Since Linux is becoming a more well known force in the OS industry. I know that I will not buy a card from ATI, unless I need some kind of cheap 2d framebuffer card for my servers.
All I can say is be very careful using these drivers. ATI isn't know for their reliable driver development and releases.
Oh and expect a performance hit, cause that ATI's nature when they release new drivers.. Maybe in the 5th revision of the drivers, you'll be on par with Windows.
Has anyone benchmarked the new drivers vs. NVIDIA yet? I'd be curious to see how well they perform.
Project Steve
Website was kinda vague but not encouraging about the ole 7500's. I stopped using Mandrake because of the lack of support for the Radeon 7500. Luckily RedHat and Suse supported my card. Maybe it was blessing in disguise.
How sleepless is the egg, knowing that which throws the stone forsees the bone.
nVidia has used a universal driver for years. Doesn't matter if you have a GeForce2 MX or a GeForce 4600, you download the same driver for the OS.
I wonder - is the "installation" package unified, or is the actual driver that gets installed unified?
IE the installation program detects what driver needs to be installed, and then pulls the relevant files out of the installation file and installs them (how many times can one use the word install or it's derivatives in one sentance before you are forced to take a technical writing class?).
I think will have to wait for the benchmarks to come out to figure out the answer.
Now, I can buy that outrageously expensive alienware laptop with the Radeon 9000 and bring it to my lan party to kick some serious rear in UT200-whatever!
_ _______
I just need more linux games.
Brother, do have another Loki to spare?
One that can run a company this time would be nice.
Ok, now back to serious work.
__________________________________________
ACK
From the release notes:
NOTE: The OpenGL driver can use AMD 3DNow! enhanced opcodes as well
and - due to design - does not need a kernel patch for AMD 3DNow!.
Now that's the kind of thing I like to see.
For Radeon cards (up to the 9000 ATM) there are free software DRI drivers as well. They cannot perform as well as these and the Windows drivers because of restrictions on what can be released as source, but they work well on BSD, which the ATI driver's don't do and NVidia didn't do until very recently.
The FreeBSD porter did a good job with the dri-devel tree - it goes through the tedious process of building and installing a new XFree86 DRI setup for you. I was running my 8500 under FreeBSD the same night I installed it, to my pleasant suprise.
Does anybody know if this driver supports the video input/output features of my All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV? I'd love to have xawtv running on my screen, or to watch mplayer on the TV.
Or do I have to run the GATOS driver for that?
I can double my Karma score my posting an interesting question and then replying with an informative response! Sweet.
(Not that I think the poster did that on purpose, but it's still funny)
Aw crap, ninjas!
I have a Radeon Mobility 7500. I think that number is too low. Dammit, and to think I almost thought I could stay in Linux to play UT2K3.
Why not fork?
I like how their license agreement on the download page is in a text area in a form. I erased all of the text and wrote "ATI will give me one BILLION dollars," and submitted it. And they accepted it! Thanks to UCITA, that's valid, too. (I think. OTOH, who the hell can figure out UCITA?)
Ooh, I submitted it again and now they owe me a monkey. Pay up, ATI!
-Waldo Jaquith
The press release gives more information. These are unified drivers for ATI cards on Linux--COOL.
There were rumours flying around a while ago that open-source Radeon 8500 drivers would be appearing. I'm therefore sad to see that ATi have decided that closed source drivers are the way forward. I don't see any reason to promote this on Slashdot, or to consider this in any way beneficial for the open source community; remember, closed-source Linux drivers are not support, they're marketing. Thanks, ATi, I'll be buying my graphics hardware elsewhere in the future.
Please, 3D drivers for Matrox Parhelia. Or even chipset specs + I'll code them. The 2D drivers are nic enough, but you could just use the VESA framebuffer...
Are these drivers open source, or do they include pre-compiled object files that cannot be re-compiled?
This is excellent news. Now all i need is to find the book on "Installing ATI Drivers under linux."
Actually, for what we used it for, we were happy.
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I can finally go back to Gentoo as my primary OS! (Now if they would just release 1.4...)
emerge rsync (update the list of what's available)
emerge -up world (preview what's comming)
emerge -u world (do it!)
Gentoo isn't like other distros, in which you must wait for a release to stay current. With gentoo, the above three commands bring you up to what is current, which is generally close to the leading edge of the state of the art.
Oh, but you don't like the freeze and want all those new ebuilds waiting in the wings for the release? Fine, just set ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" and you can jump past the pending release and play with all the experimental stuff coming down the pike.
I have one set of partitions for exactly that purpose, and one set for the more formal, stable stuff. And you know what? With this approach, I don't have to even care at all when, or even if, they're going to have a "final" release of 1.4. The only other distros I know which come close to this is Debian unstable and Source Mage. The former suffers from the Curse of Binary Distros (lag behind the state of the art by weeks or, in the case of xfree, months), the latter is quite good, comparable to gentoo in many respects (but a different approach, so like salad vs. steak, the choice is entirely up to your own sensibilities and taste).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Any chance it could work with notebook chips ?
I have Radeon Mobility M6-C/P which works only
in VESA mode and I can not even watch a fullscreen
movie! It is too slow! (Notebook is 1.6GHz
Celeron so it is graphics).
Shameless plug!!!
a te gory=177&item=2073140767
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&c
Now I can buy an ATI card. Good for them and for us.
unfinished: (adj.)
In addition to rpm2tgz there's rpm2cpio, and someone else already mentioned alien. Gentoo has rpm2tgz as an ebuild. Debian has alien in the apt-get pool.
A solution to the problem with music today
They cannot perform as well ... because of restrictions on what can be released as source
What restrictions are there exactly? Is there a legal limit on the performance of Open Source drivers? I've been blaming the slowness of my 7500 on Mesa (in Linux I get equal or lesser performance to a Geforce 2MX 200, while in Windows I get performance almost on par with a Geforce 2 Ultra). Why can't they release faster Open Source drivers? Are the specs incomplete or something? I'll write them myself if the specs are available.
I wish other companies were like 3dfx and released full specs and source code.. Voodoo cards were fun to write drivers for.
A solution to the problem with music today
I remember several times trying to make ATI drivers run on Win2k and then having to reinstall as the driver wouldnt go away in safe mode, and i couldnt boot into normal mode without having scrambled video.
How badly will these drivers cripple your linux installation? Most of these new X11 drivers also include a kernel module used to control the frame-buffer specific operations of the particular card... this means if your radeonfb module is replaced and it's defective, you're screwed.
Personally, I just use the VESA driver on X11, I have a Windows computer with a Parhelia for my 3D needs.
So, if I were going to update the driver, I'd wait a few weeks for any problems to expose themselves.
I just bought a mini atx board with ATI card on board, I'll have to see if I can get the tv out working under Linux.
I'm typing this on a Gentoo box with two DVI LCD monitors attached to my Ti4600 card. Running one large desktop across both monitors WITH 3D acceleration across both monitors.
I might add that you can't do that with the ATI drivers, nor is there any flavor of ATI card that drives two DVI monitors (not that there's a huge selection of such cards with Nvidia chips, but Gainward does make one).
Nvidia is really the best choice for performance graphics on Linux.
FYI.
jonathan
This topic is timely, because I'm spec'ing out a new computer for the family for Christmas. In these dog days of the economy (national, local, and mine) I'm trying to keep the entry cost down. Besides, it will give me the chance to add parts over the next year or two.
Someday DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2 will be worthy targets for purchase. But today, only the Radeon 9700 is there, and I'm not spending that kind of money. So near term, the target is Doom3.
My price target is around $60, since I plan to replace it in a year or two when R300/NV30 features become affordable. ($150-range) But I don't want to wait until then before playing Doom3.
The Radeon 8500 cards are all above my range, so...
Some Radeon 9000 cards are in my range.
Some Radeon 8500LE cards are in my range.
Will these new drivers work for these cards?
Will these cards (9000, 8500LE) play Doom3?
My backup plan has been a GeForce4MX-440, which is supposed to play Doom3 with reduced features and speed - not a preferred card.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It seems you lived in M.C.Escher country...
Nvidia's been sitting on their old linux driver for sometime. Meanwhile a couple of nice windows updates have shown up. I'm looking forward to some competition in the linux 3d gaming world again.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
which totally sucks on a laptop. I've got a dell insiron 8200 which has a geforce4. the older drivers could be re-compiled to ignore apm, so I could hobble by. however they crashed a lot. the newer ones are more stable, but will lock up the machine when put to sleep. the recompile/patch doesn't work. nvidia is ignoring the apm issue despite many pleas from the community.
ATI is a Canadian company, are they liable under UCITA?
Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian guy. Is he liable under the DMCA?
-Waldo Jaquith
I just posted install instructions on the Gentoo Forums under the Hardware section.
Just remember to compile your kernel with AGP support as a module and compile in DRI support but no drivers.
Anyone know of any tools to use the built-in DVD decoder in GNU/Linux? My software decoder still chokes a bit on fast action scenes.
Now can Doom III be played on a Linux box, I remember John Carmack saying how only the Geforce series was to be supported?
3000 dead over past 2 years, still no free Palestinians, still
This is all well and nice, but I have a laptop running the mobility radeon 7500. What am I supposed to do? The machine is only 2 months old and they have no plans of supporting it Gatos and DRI suck. I also have a desktop running the original radeon and Mandrake 7.2. Forget 3d on that machine even emacs runs like shit. So to hell with ATI give me Nvidia.
We used it. RS-485 can go several hundred feet and is highly noise resistant. And much lower cost than interbus-s, fibre, etc. If you need noise resistance, speed isn't a factor (IIRC, after 24kbps it began to Have Issues), and you want to keep the cost down, then RS-485 is a good solution.
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It doesn't matter where you're from when you commit a crime in the US. If your crime occured in the US, you'll get deported, or picked up when you step off your airplane.
The reason that Dmitri shouldn't have been touched is that he didn't violate the DMCA. Someone else in his company did. Whomever distributed his product is the "criminal." Creating the product occured 100% on Russian soil, and was not a violation of the DMCA. Shipping it/wiring it to the USA was a violation. But Dmitri didn't do that. Since this is criminal law we're talking about, you can only go after the individuals that commit the crime, not some random member of their company.
Unless I'm totally misunderstanding the situation. Maybe Elcomsoft is a two person company, and Dmitri really did send the product to the US. Maybe the "crime" was his presentation, and not distributing their product.
Either way, it's the law that's fucked up, not the fact that it was applied to a foreigner. Being from another country doesn't give you diplomatic immunity. And it shouldn't. The US isn't bad in that regard. If you mail a bomb to Italy, and you live in Greece, you'll get deported, or arrested the next time you travel to Italy. Right?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
and I got an All-in-wonder 7500 for my homebrew PVR.
Butterscotch is superior to vanilla when analyzed at a compound level.
In fact, butterscotch is superior in all aspects. Butterscotch tastes better, due to its ingredients it is healthier. Recent studies show that butterscotch *looks* better too. The only thing that vanilla is better than butterscotch at is hit/miss ratio of the trash can. And that is because butterscotch actually gets eaten; recent surveys indicate that butterscotch pudding is preferred 100% to 0% over vanilla pudding.
Butterscotch also contains a larger feature set than vanilla. When distilled, butterscotch makes a great, long-lasting chew-candy. When frozen, it makes a fantastic jawbreaker, when heated, it results in a glorious milkshake.
In conclusion, your must see what is obvious: Butterscotch is Better Because it Begins with a B, and because they don't make Apple pudding. If you weren't so closed minded to new ideas, you would have seen this a long time ago. I hope that this simple explanation corrects your longstanding error in judgement.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
Well, I own an All-in-Wonder Radeon. It's not _that_ old (300USD a couple years ago), and it's unsupported by their unified driver! And I don't even talk about the multimedia features, TV in-out, which are mostly broken in Gatos tools/drivers and non existent in their own driver.
I'm back on Win2k for the time being, partly because of this. And I wonder if my next purchase will be ATI, based on my current experience. Sad, because the hardware is rock-solid!
have you been defaced today?
Any company releasing Linux drivers is a good thing.
But ATI should release some better drivers for their ATI Wonder card. Search the net and see how many users have problems with these.
I went to the download page and discovered that the
." This allows me to build the NVIDIA drivers for any distro I'm using OR any tweeked kernel I'm using.
rpms were ONLY in i386 packages, no re-linkable source distro.
In the past I've always downloaded the NVIDIA src RPMS and just done a "rpm --rebuild . .
Restricting the users to the distro's stock kernel kinda sucks.
But it doesn't suck nearly as bad as having NO support whatsoever.
Thanks ATI, you just made the decision for my next notebook considerably more difficult.
You moderators smoke crack.
How is posting the story again off topic? It is redundant you turds.
for the ATI 8500 chipset
...waiting for my new Voodoo 5 5500 drivers, damn it! %$#!@
:P
C'mon, ATI, throw me a bone here!
Oh my god, have we slashdotted ati.com? I can't reach their site anymore.
:-)
Probably running their new drivers on the linux-powered webserver.
Um, unless you're running a kernel from the Stone Age, no patch is needed to use any 3DNow! optimized applications.
3DNow! support goes back at LEAST to kernel 2.2, as I remember using gogo on a K6-2/300 3-4 years ago to rip MP3s. No kernel patch needed.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Sorry to mess up your rant. But an important difference is that with an OSS platform (driver and OS) we know that either *can be* improved. The same can't be guaranteed on a platform that's top to bottom closed. So on a closed source platform, with all the corporate precedent, the only course of action is to complain. On the open source platform one CAN'T as easily complain because the power to change the situation lies within one's grasp. That's one of the reasons to treat closed-source drivers as a necessary evil because it takes somewhat from the latter, and gives to the former, and who wants to go down that road again?
The 4200s are probably close to $100 even right now (Were $125 2-3 months ago). They will probably drop down even more by Xmas.
I would strongly suggest waiting for reports of driver quality before jumping to ATi because of this release - Their track record as far as drivers go is not very good... (I've been burned by ATi products not living up to their claims and crashing my machine due to bad drivers too many times to ever touch them again.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Should've thought of this before hitting submit.
Doom 3 won't be out for another few months. Recycle your old video card and don't buy a video card for Doom 3 until the game comes out.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"ATI Releases New [...] Drivers"
My first reaction when I read that was to laugh.
ATI "never" releases drivers.
I was a long time ati (VGA Wonder+ -> Rage Pro) user but their driver support sucked so I went with nVidia.
What motherboard? Is it an 164SX, 164LX, or 164UX? 164SX and 164LX should have no problems in SRM console. I do know that the 164UX (Ruffian) couldn't operate my Voodoo5 5500 or Voodoo3 3000. I'm going to try a nice ATI Radeon 9000 (R250) and hope the Arcs Bios sees it ok. Voodoo2(s) work splendid and faster on the 164UX. On a side note, 164UX is the motherboard that has a BIOS that can't yet be upgraded to SRM; so only older ATI Rage Pro(s), Matrox G200(s), S3(s), Elsa Synergy(s)(Glint/Delta), and non-supported PowerStorm(s) will only work.
Please let me know your 21164's board logic (motherboard).
As stated on http://www.ati.com/support/identify/ ATI differentiates between "Built by ATI" (cards sold by ATI itself) and "Powered by ATI" (cards using ATI chips by other vendors).
... does it really make a difference?
This news referers only to "Built by ATI" cards. I don't like these little differences, but with so many Original/OEM/Dell/Relabeled configurations out there
-- word!
I was rather happy about this, considering I was currently running a CVS build of XFree86 (4.2.99.2 I think) to get my Radeon 9000 working. So I switched back to Redhat 8's default XFree86 build (4.2.0) and gave it a go. And did it work? No! D'oh!
(II) FireGL8700/8800: Driver for chipset: ATI R200 QH (AGP),
ATI R200 QL (AGP), ATI R200 QT (AGP), ATI R200 BB (AGP),
Radeon RV250 If, Radeon RV250 Ig, Radeon RV250 Lf (M9),
Radeon RV250 Lg (M9), Radeon RV250 Ld (M9), Radeon R300-4P AD,
Radeon R300-4P AE, Radeon R300-4P AF, Radeon R300-4P AG,
Radeon R300 ND, Radeon R300 NE, Radeon R300 NF, Radeon R300 NG
(II) Primary Device is: PCI 01:00:0
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:1:0:0) found
Which is odd, considering it is there:
[richf@bagpuss ~]$ lspci -v | grep ATI
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R250 If [Radeon 9000] (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 496e (rev 01)
I changed the PCI line in XF86Config to use 01:00:1 instead of 01:00:0 and it got further and seemed to detect my card nicely until right up to the end:
(WW) fglrx(0): Bad V_BIOS checksum
(II) fglrx(0): Primary V_BIOS segment is: 0xc000
(--) fglrx(0): Chipset: "Radeon RV250 If" (Chipset = 0x4966)
(--) fglrx(0): (PciSubVendor = 0x148c, PciSubDevice = 0x2039)
(--) fglrx(0): board vendor info: third party grafics adapter - NOT original ATI
(--) fglrx(0): Linear framebuffer (phys) at 0xd8000000
(--) fglrx(0): MMIO registers at 0xe9000000
(--) fglrx(0): ChipRevID = 0x00
(--) fglrx(0): VideoRAM: 131072 kByte (64-bit DDR SDRAM)
(EE) fglrx(0): board/chipset is not supported by this driver (third party board)
(EE) fglrx(0): PreInitConfig failed
(EE) fglrx(0): R200PreInit failed
(II) fglrx(0): === [R200PreInit] === end
Bastards! 3rd party board it is, but it is still your damned RV250 chip, so bloody don't try and use the R200 init. Duh.
Anyone got any help for me here?
RS-485 protocol is the same as RS-232. The electronics are different, but that should be handled by the hardware.
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The ATI Radeon drivers provided by the DRI project are opensource and CROSS PLATFORM. The nVidia drivers from NVIDIA are closed source and only work on X86.
With a Radeon, you can experience accelerated GLX using DRI on Alpha platforms. The better reason for OpenSource.
NVIDIA's drivers work flawlessly on many, but not all X86 platforms; some people complain and move on to ATI Radeon, others open champaign.
Wow. That was a gigantically broad, sweeping generalization that really is not correct.
:)
If a government wants to extract a foreign national, they need to file for deportation in the country where the person resides. For example, if someone can convince a court that after being shipped the the US, they will recieve treatment that's deemed unfair, then the court of the resident's country will often refuse to deport.
As well, if that Dmitri comitted a crime in Russia, then they would try him, and hold off on the extradition case until after his trial, and if he was convicted, after his sentence.
Also some countries will throw out charges brought against national entities (corps, individuals) on grounds in their country. In the recent Canada v. umm.... Japan Tobacco? Anyways some huge tobacco giant that isn't Philip Morris, there was a lot of smuggling of cigarettes that took place, as at the time Canada had raised the taxes on smokes to an extraordinary level. For some reason Canada couldn't sue the Canadian subsidary, so they took it to the US Supreme Court, where counsel for the Tobacco giant successfully argued that Canada was attempting to recover owed duties in a US court, which is against US law. Actually, the argument went in a funny manner. Tobacco said (basically), "Well Canada is our buddy. It would be nice to be able to help them collect duties, but then countries which we aren't so friendly with would attempt to do the same." And then the whole "slippery slope" thing came into focus. And the Supreme Court agreed. Ottawa wasn't too pleased, because when it was thrown out, they had spent $18 million preparing litigation.
So yes, in a lot of cases, it DOES matter where you are when you commit a crime.
This is, of course, totally offtopic, but it's all good
RPM is the standard Linux package file format. If your distro aims to be Linux Standards Base compliant, it must have a mechanism of installing such files.
Preferably a full RPM implementation, but systems like alien or even (I guess) rpm2cpio are acceptable.
Nice for them to release drivers and all, but they dont provide anything for laptop versions of any cards.
John Carmack's hardly the person to decide that. It's up to ATI to supply a good driver.
:-)
Of course it's up to Id Software to optimise for any given card. I guess it's somewhat indicative of JC's sentiments that Doom III was demoed at E3 (?) on a R300 (Radeon 9700) card.
I just had a 1-hour confrontation with those drivers. There are several things:
Well, after installing a fresh X 4.2.1 from debian unstable, fixing about thirty parser errors in a source file and wreaking general havoc, I was at least able to start X. 3D seems to work, but I was not inclined to do much testing beyond fgl_glxgears and glxinfo after realizing that I was unable to use a text console without snapping back to the X console every second.
All this slowly leads to a heartfelt "fuck ATI" feeling and I'll have plenty time to ponder this while I restore my X config that mysteriously lost all 3D acceleration and Xvideo capabilities after switching back to the DRI driver.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =2074058774
Sorry, but when I couldn't get my Radeon 8500 to drive the DVI output at 1600x1200 under Linux, I voted with my wallet and went out and bought a GeForce 4 card for my new (Linux) machine. The ATI is left in my Windows machine, which is in the process of being shut down, while the Nvidia card drives my TFT at 1600 x 1200 very nicely with SuSE.
3D I don't need, but I was surprised ATI hadn't figured that high-end cards are also bought to drive high-end displays (as well as for playing games) and so cross-platform support does count for sales (see also the ATI workstation cards).
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
Um, I didn't mean to imply that deporting someone was easy. Is that the only part that you felt was really incorrect?
Dmitri did something in Russia that would have been a crime, had he committed it in the US. So he should not have been arrested. All I was trying to say was that being Russian isn't should have made him safe. It was that he didn't violate the DMCA, someone else in his company did. If *that* person had flown to the US, all the same things would have happened to that person, and there'd be no jurisdictional question at all. Right?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
And here I had ATI to point out as the "good guy" as opposed to nVidia ("The Microsoft of Video Card Manufacturers(TM)).
(deserved) Flames aside, I guess ATI still releases specs (right?) so it's not so bad. The specs are still there, and that's the real problemn (lack of specs in hardware).
Problem is with proprietary drivers available, incentive to develop free alternatives will drop significantly, because too many people just don't care.
I'm about to dive into these new drivers, do they support 16 bit X color depth? The origional fglx driver only did 24 bit color which prevented programs/emulators like WineX from running games. Thanks DrFishstik
has anyone gotten the video capture working with the gatos driver for the All-in-Wonder Rage128 Pro 32mb. I get weird "blue" noise in xawtv...seems like I'm close...
Have any gentoo users tried this driverset? I'm lookin to switch my Red Hat 7.3 box to Gentoo 1.4_RC1. Thanks - DrFishstik
I believe that on a whole we are being too hard on ati these drivers are V 1.0 they are not perfect they do not support every feature on every card that ATI has ever mad but they ar a good smart and they are not completeley closed source they have hoven all of the propritary code in to a single library and I believe the reason for doing this is that they do not own that code it is being lisenced from a 3rd party company! So why dont we reserve judgment untill they are a little more mature or at least untill V 1.1
The drivers will work on any "Built by ATI" Radeon 8500 or higher card (up to the 9700).
What about the ATI mobility series? I use a laptop and I am tired of having to dual boot just in order to have fun at a LAN party.
source for that would be nice, to port it to NetBSD eventually. Not all the world is Linux!
- Hubert
If an RPM requirement was added to the LSB, I don't want my boxes to be LSB compliant.
Either way, it's the law that's fucked up, not the fact that it was applied to a foreigner. Being from another country doesn't give you diplomatic immunity. And it shouldn't. The US isn't bad in that regard. If you mail a bomb to Italy, and you live in Greece, you'll get deported, or arrested the next time you travel to Italy. Right?
Actually no, being from another country does provide one with some diplomatic immunity. In your mail bomb example both countries agree on that a crime was committed. But even so, it's not always the case that the criminal will be deported. He could be tried in his home country under his home countrie's laws. In fact, even if he went to Italy and got picked up it's STILL not clear who should try him. Take for instance recent cases where a canadian committed murder in the US. The US obviously tried the criminal, but there was the issue of the death penalty. Since Canada doesn't agree with the death penalty there was diplomatic touble. Canada tried to get the guy tried in Canada for this reason.
When laws like the DMCA are applied to foriegners it gets even more complicated. Russia does not acknowledge DCMA and so the company that Dmitri worked for did nothing wrong. I'm not sure if this was the case, but Russia could very well could have fought with the US over the arrest of Dmitri on diplomatic grounds.
So yes, the US is bad in that regard. They are a superpower and so have no problems imposing their own laws on other countires citizins.
Finally I can play Tron.
I installed the drivers in Gentoo with no problems what so ever(well a couple minor ones). Xvideo finally works perfectly, and so does video overlay. Maybe its Debians hold on to old libs thats the problem above.
RPM is the standard Linux package file format. If your distro aims to be Linux Standards Base compliant, it must have a mechanism of installing such files.
No. RPM is not the standard Linux package file format. The standard Linux package file format is the tarball, either gzipped (.tar.gz) or bzip2ed (.tar.bz2), or uncompressed (.tar).
RPM is a part of the LSB standard, which is just one of several Linux standards that are NOT universally accepted, nor should it be. RPM was placed in the LSB because of Red Hat politicking and in an IMHO very illegetimate effort to give them an edge over other distributions. Indeed, RPM's inclusion in the LSB is the main reason why the LSB should, IMHO, either be rectified to exclude it, ignored altogether, or (ideally) adhered to in other respects, with the RPM provision sumarilly ignored.
The pointlessness of including RPM in the LSB standard is underscored by the incompatability between Suse RPMs, Red Hat RPMs, and Mandrake RPMs (to name just three), and by the success of many products which have been packaged in proper, distribution-agnostic form (nvidia drivers being one such example, but by no means the only one).
Yes, superior distributions such as Debian and Gentoo can extract the necessary data from the cumbersome RPM format, but forcing them to jump through that particular Red Hat hoop is neither justified, nor desirable.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
So when are they going to rework their site so I can access it in Opera for Linux and download these drivers?
Oh. Of course, sometimes it's very hard to get someone deported. Hence, "You'll get deported, or arrested the next time you travel to Italy."
But I really don't understand the case you describe. There was a case where a Canadian committed murder in the US, got arrested in the US, and they tried to get him deported to Canada before he was tried in the US? I've definitely never heard of anything like that before. I've heard of Canada refusing extradition due to our (braindead) capital punishment, but what you describe is pretty bizarre.
Sure, if the US asked Russia to extradite Dmitri, we'd get laughed out of Moscow. But that's not what happened. Again. The problem is that we have an unjust law. Dmitri shouldn't have been arrested because he did not violate that law. Not because he's Russian. Being a citizen of one country doesn't mean you can violate the laws of another, and then expect to travel there. Again, if the *crime* occurs in the US, and then the criminal is in the US, arrest the criminal. This is not complicated, and it works the same way if you... do drugs in Singapore... steal fruit in Qatar... whatever.
The problem is the unjust law.
The problem is the unjust law.
The problem is the unjust law.
Right?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Greetings, dear AC,
I would be *VERY* interesting in knowing how you got XVideo to work with this driver. I've just installed it on my Gentoo, and XVideo just doesn't work. The XVideo extension is advertised as having been loaded in XFree.log, but xvinfo says it isn't. Durn it.
Thanks in advance!
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Considering that many Linux games (such as UT2K3) themselves are "secret-ware".....
Some people are a little too impractical when it comes to open source. For example:
"Give me the source for Neverwinter Nights!"
"Uh, no..."
"Argh! I hate you and I'm never gonna buy your games again and I'm gonna break my CDs!!!!!!1111oneoneone"
" Running through binary code isn't exactly easy to do. It's doable when you're trying to reverse engineer how the hardware works, but if you're trying to figure out how NVIDIA does some sophisticated high level OpenGL optimizations, it's decidedly non-trival. And given that the NVIDIA driver is some 7 megabytes of code, including the kernel driver, GLX and XAA modules, and libGL and libGLcore libraries, it would be impossible. Saying that the should open source it because somebody could dissasemble it is just like saying that all software should be open sourced, because all software can be disassembled."
True however Nvidia's not worried about an open source programmer doing the work. They're worried about commercial entities. The problem with that argument is that the competition can and does study and reverse-engineer each others work. From hardware to software, and they have the money to afford the neat toys and personnel to make that possible. A former company I use to work for did that all the time with their competitors. It would have been foolish not to. Security by obscurity has been discredited so why is Nvidia using that as a defense?
Did you generate a new XF86Config file or did you just use one from the previous FireGL/8500 drivers?
I'm using the drivers here and XVideo works fine.
Dinivin
Sorry for being unclear. Canada wanted to try the murderer in Canada, rather than the US. I agree, the real problem is an unjust law.
But the point I was trying to make is that when you arrest a foreigner, even if that person is in your country, it's somewhat of a dimplomatic situation. Even when the crime is something clearly wrong like murder there can be diplomatic issues. So it is the case that being a foreigner gives you *some* diplomatic protection, in that your home country may fight for your rights.
I think the US should have the political awareness not to enforce questionable laws on foregniers. It's the same thing as say, Iran detaining an American female for violating some weird religous law. We don't say that Iran is *right* in doing this do we? And Iran knows that if it does things like that diplomatic relations will be harmed. In the same way the US is in the wrong in the Dimitri case.
***Disclaimer: I don't know that Iran specifically has crazy relgious laws, but I know certainly some middle east countries do***
it would be nice to know which GL extensions it exports in linux
Now, OK, so ATi will likely get on to producing new, updated drivers that are compatible. After all, they want people to buy their stuff, and giving support is good PR, makes people think that their products are worth buying, etc. Further, good drivers help to put their product in a good light.
Now then. What happens if when the change happens, some time has passed, ATi have stopped producing the cards in question, and have NEW exciting GODMONSTER cards with support for DirectX17 and its wonderful new "Aardvark Mapping" technology (none of which will be of any use to any of us who aren't actually using Windows). What they want at that point, is for us all to buy that new card, so they get their money back on their huge R&D investment (however much the things cost).
Now, whilst it may happen that they will decide that continuing to suport old stuff is also good PR and keeps people happy, that doesn't always happen in our wonderful world of computing. There is a very good chance that they will instead say "No, we have discontinued support for our old Radeon cards from 2002; They are still supported under Linux kernel 2.4, but for a full feature-packed multimedia virtual-reality 3d experience under Linux 3.6, you should purchase one of our GODMONSTER cards, which are fully compatible with OpenGL1.0, and only cost 250 quid".
Well, that's what I think, anyway, but I'm a great big cynic, and like to bitch about stuff. OTOH, earlier Radeon cards apparently have open sourced OpenGL support from the DRI (I don't know how well these work as I myself have a Matrox card- but I'd been thinking about Radeon recently), and so maybe those are a good investment, I dunno.
Be careful! New moon tonight.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see open source drivers for NVIDIA hardware.
As far as instability, I'm guessing you have an AMD system with a VIA chipset? There are a lot of hardware bugs with VIA chipsets, especially the earlier Athlon chipsets. There are a bunch of workarounds, you should try them all before giving up.
Cheers.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
As it is, I think the way you will be seeing a monkey is if you start beating your own.
That's "spanking the monkey" or "beating the meat".
Thank you for 'playing'.
Whichever two moderators rated this as "overrated" have no sense of humor and no concept of what the moderation system is about.
This post works for me on multiple levels. I give it two thumbs up.
We're talking:
(at my "normal" mailorder supplier, whom I've come to trust)
AOpen GeForce3 Ti200 for $89
ATI Radeon 8500LE (white box) for $79
ATI Radeon 9000 (OEM) for $72
All else equal, my preferred choice would be the 8500LE, because I think I'd be better off with the features than the clock speed. But I'm concerned about both ATI cards, because neither is a retail. I've heard that FireGL drivers look for some sort of "GenuineATI" signature before loading, and they might flunk. OTOH, there are the open source drivers that should work at least for the 8500LE, if not for either.
The nVidia option is the most expensive, and at the moment I'm trying to shave pennies, especially since I figure I'll be replacing in one or two years.
Amazing that over a decade ago I paid $215 for a Video7 FastWrite. Come to think of it, I don't think any of that generation of card makers is around, any more.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Does anyone know if this will support dual monitor mode on the Radeon 8500?
I'm getting sick of seeing my Gnome desktop in stereo. It'd be nice to have dual monitor support like in Win32.
Huh?
What is really needed is a newer alternative to X. XFree86 has been on the back edge of technology for the longest time and it is time for someone to take over the ranks of the Linux desktop and actually produce something that is highly stable and up-to-date on the OpenGL standards. Possibly there needs to be a different accelerated GUI environment that is specific to x86 and PPC platforms so that the techology can produce faster results. I would love to one day start my linux box and have a nice stable GUI system such as Windows or Mac OSX (more like OSX). I have had too many occasions where my X applications freeze or crash for no reason. I wish, though, that ATI and Nvidia would wake up and start providing better support for their products under linux. But, a new GUI system built from the ground up and supported by the major video card manufacturers is definitely the answer for linux.
I've been looking for working 3d acceleration for my Radeon Mobility 7500 in linux... Will these work? I want to play UT2K3!
Shit is greasy (contains fat). If you spread shit on your face, your face becomes greasy.
Stoopid.
ATI bought Fire like a year ago. Fire have 133t, German, OpenGL, professional workstation, $4000 videocard, driver coders who've been writing drivers for Unix workstations since the beginning. Nvidia might write drivers which work well by gamer standards, but Fire is used to writing (Unix) drivers for systems where ever screwing up at all is totally unacceptable.
These new drivers were probably written by Fire guys, which means they're probably in a completely different universe quality-wise.
Remember this is Linux, they get like one working driver a year, its news to them, now at last they might actually be able to get a 256 colour display working. Just think, in ten years time they might even have hot-pluggable USB!
Basically, all parser errors occur on lines that use the __KE_DEBUG (or something similar) macro in fglxr_public.c. The macros are defined as __KE_DEBUG(fmt,args...) and it seems gcc <2.96 can't handle that when called with just one parameter. All I did was rewriting each call to that macro to have at least NULL as second parameter.
There are also errors that are caused by the patched drmP.h. I got around those by disabling the patch contained in make.sh.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
1. A package format is expected to provide more than a mere compressed archive of files. Tar is an _archive_ format, not a _package_ format. I'd ask you kindly not to post a response to this comment until you understand the difference.
2. Using incompatability between rpm's produced by different distros as an argument against rpm as the LSB standard package format is really back-asswards, given that the one of the main points of the LSB is to _ensure_ distribution interoperability. An rpm made in adherence to the LSB spec will work on any LSB-compliant distribution.
---
Death to the sarcasm-impaired!
Do you know why NVIDIA backtracked on their promise to deliver open source drivers? It was a couple years ago, at the time they released some initial drivers that worked with XFree86 3.x.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
It makes no sense to me why people hate RPM so much. A packaging format of some kind seems like an absolute necessity to me. Tarballs are most certainly not a packaging format.
A proper packaging format will keep track of what's installed on your system, where it's installed, and what depends on it, and what it depends on. This is so that addition and removal of packages is easy.
The only advantage people have ever given for .deb is apt-get. But, it seems to me that the same functionality is replicated in RedHat network and Red Carpet. The usefulness of apt-get has more to do with infrastructure support than it has to do with the .deb packaging format.
So, please, tell me why RPMs are bad, other than that RedHat created them.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Corrupted my X-windows!
Should know by now!
The only thing informative about this post is that GeekDork is a moron.
Saying he installed xf86 from 'debian unstable' (points to him using debian stable).
HEY maybe if you would have bothered to RTFM...
The drivers kick ass '.'
That's why I mentioned stealing fruit in Qatar and doing drugs in Singapore. Both of those actions carry incredibly unjust consequences, and the US Gov't will do nothing to protect its citizens from those consequences.
Even when there was that huge outcry 'cause some dumbass American was going to get caned in Singapore, the *Gov't* didn't do anything. Pols might have lectured about how Singapore shouldn't cane the kid, but there was no official action.
Iran *does* have "crazy religious laws" but it's still a particularly bad example. Since the US and the Iranian gov'ts do not have any relations, an American woman in Iran would have less than no diplomatic sway. The only protection she might get would be due to internal popular pro-US sentiment. But that probably wouldn't do anything anyway.
Iran would be wrong for doing it, but for the same reason they'd be wrong for doing it to their own population. As long as Iran is a sovereign nation, they can make whatever inane law they please. I guess it can't violate internationally accepted human rights, or they might face war, but that's really the only threat.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Gentoos portage of the Xfree doesnt support the 9700 yet. (Thou I saw 4.2.99-3 was out last week, which might) I know the CVS version of Xfree did find my 9700 with --configure.
I'm considering a 9700-pro.
Do you find cvs-xfree to provide adeqaute 2d performance / support?
Have you tried ATI's new binary drivers (for good 3d support) and if so, how did you find them?
TIA
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
OK, after fiddling with the config, it actually got somewhat better. If you create a XF86Config using the fglrxconfig tool and then copy some stuff from there to your real XF86Config (omitting the BusID and Screen entries), XVideo works and the overlay problems seem to be gone. My system still restarts X when switching to a text console though and 2D feels a little slower than with the DRI drivers.
On an unrealted note: does anyone here know how to get the "two screens, one framebuffer" behaviour under Windows?
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Does this driver set support 16-bit color? The previous FGL drives only did 24, which causes some programs to not work properly.
Hmm. Ok. I see your point. ;) I'm surprised actually that the US wouldn't do anything to support it's citiziens from such things. It must cause *some* diplomatic tensions.
Anyways, yes, I guess it is the laws that are really at fault. We live in a scary world.
All there?
If this is the whole story, it's a significant departure from ATI's previous R200 driver. Which is why I suspect it's not the whole story.
With the R200 driver, there were four components:
So 2 of 4 components were binary-only, a third was binary-mostly with a small stub for multi-kernel compatibility, and the last was a set of trivial modifications to existing GPL code and was therefore open source.
If this driver is like their previous one, which I suspect it is, there's no way it could be considered "open source".
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
I have a sapphire board -- when I got it, my buddy assured me that "third party boards are just as good as the name brands" since he worked as a PC integrator for a couple of years, I trusted him... :) [that and he's my brother-in-law]
Here is the XF86 log output:
(II) Module int10: vendor="The XFree86 Project"
compiled for 4.2.0, module version = 1.0.0
ABI class: XFree86 Video Driver, version 0.5
(II) fglrx(0): initializing int10
(WW) fglrx(0): Bad V_BIOS checksum
(II) fglrx(0): Primary V_BIOS segment is: 0xc000
(--) fglrx(0): Chipset: "Radeon RV250 If" (Chipset = 0x4966)
(--) fglrx(0): (PciSubVendor = 0x174b, PciSubDevice = 0x7192)
(--) fglrx(0): board vendor info: third party grafics adapter - NOT original ATI
(--) fglrx(0): Linear framebuffer (phys) at 0xd0000000
(--) fglrx(0): MMIO registers at 0xcd800000
(--) fglrx(0): ROM-BIOS at 0xcffe0000
(--) fglrx(0): ChipRevID = 0x00
(--) fglrx(0): VideoRAM: 131072 kByte (64-bit DDR SDRAM)
(EE) fglrx(0): board/chipset is not supported by this driver (third party board)
(EE) fglrx(0): PreInitConfig failed
(EE) fglrx(0): R200PreInit failed
(II) fglrx(0): === [R200PreInit] === end
Note the explicit detection of "powered by" vs. "built by" and subsequent refusal to load & run.
The errors caused by the patch are caused by the fact that __KE_ERROR and __KE_DEBUG *and* DRM_ERR are all macros that expand to basically printk's. The patch changed the way that those macros (which are already present in the kernel source) take the arguments. All of them were changed the same way. By disabling the patch, and rewritting the __KE macros to properly accept the calls, it compiled fine. I got it to compile but I haven't messed with setting it up yet, as I'm a little disturbed that these guys couldn't write a printk properly. Not that I'm an expert in kernel programming, I don't see how this code ever built for them on a gcc 2.95 system, unless they just built on a gcc 3 system and never tested it on a gcc 2.95 system. My thoughts.
C Pungent
2) Sell Doom 3 for Linux.
mp3: l33t term for empty.
Shoot me again.
Just proving that the quickest way to solve the problem is to post a
whine to the newsgroups: within moments the solution presents itself to
me, and meanwhile my ass is hanging out on the Net... *sigh*...
-- Dave Phillips, dlphilp@bright.net, about problem solving via news
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...