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ATI Releases New Linux Drivers

Posted by michael on from the tainted-kernel dept.

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)."

3 of 431 comments (clear)

  1. No need to suffer the wait by FreeUser · · Score: 2, Offtopic

    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
  2. DVD Player by jbailey999 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    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.

  3. Re:Why support binary drivers? by Tyreth · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    I don't remember reading a "you must believe in the philosophy of the GNU/Linux community to be considered a memeber of the Slashdot community" when I signed up. Even though I do believe in the philosophy, not everyone here does - nor do they have to.

    Slashdot caters its news to the geek masses, typically people of our opinions - but I see no reason why this news should be prohibited. This is important news for some/many slashdot readers, including myself, for where the only option for now has been nVidia. Now we have more of a choice.

    I agree that ATI should have released the drivers opensource, but that does not exclude it for being news that is important to many slashdot readers.