ATI's Radeon Linux drivers no longer supported?

SuperBug writes "After viewing the previous story on Slashdot about the Radeon 9800 vs GF FX 5900, I checked out ATI's web-site which seems to have been re-designed relatively recently. It seems strikingly similar to nVidia's site regarding the driver selections. I thought "great, ths should be much better to find my drivers now. At least a little simpler." To my surprise. I found this message for Linux Graphics Drivers "Not Supported". Thinking this had to be a mistake, I took a look at the "Discontinued Products" list under the customer care link and lo and behold. Just about every recent card is there. I just wanna know, what gives?"

Comments

Maybe....

[Graemee]

The guy who wrote them got hit by a bus and they didn't find the source code.

Re:Maybe....

[TopShelf]

That damn bus is dangerous - always seems to wipe out the one guy who can resolve a sticky situation. How come it never hits the PHB's?

Re:Maybe....

[hesiod]

> How come it never hits the PHB's

'cuz they're never in the office, or they have good enough parking spaces to hop in their SUVs before going anywhere near a bus.

Re:Maybe....

[BorgDrone]

How come it never hits the PHB's?
They do, only you never hear about it because no one really cares what happens to PHB's

Re:Maybe....

[slide-rule]

That damn bus is dangerous - always seems to wipe out the one guy who can resolve a sticky situation. How come it never hits the PHB's?

Who exactly do you think drives the bus? ;-)

Easy! Buy a FireGL card..

[Rinikusu]

All of their FireGL cards still seem to "be supported", so just fork out the additional $600 or so and grab one of them. :)

Might as well go for the obvious...

[Raul654]

...before someone else does.

CONSPIRACY! I say conspiracy! Microsoft is paying ATI to cut off support for the linux drivers. They secretly made a large cash payment in a bag with a big '$' on it, probably made the drop somewhere in Daily plaza. This is their new strategy -- paying blood-money to other companies to get them to cut off support for our beloved linux. It's world-wide, dammit! Why won't anyone believe me?

Re:Is that an official distribution?

[blixel]

but for many people, "drivers that some guy built" just don't cut it

I guess you don't use Linux at all then eh?

Re:This article is all wrong

[botzi]

Lastly, why don't slashdot editors do some sort of background checking. What are they being paid for?

What do you mean by "they're being paid for??".... Like they're really getting paid???? Geeezee..... That's better than school...no seriously... I mean, in the classroom you make typos=>you got punished(low mark, bullet in the head, whatever), here(/.) you make typos you got paid.....;oPPPPP

The real question is...

[emo boy]

Will 3dfx's Voodoo2 12MB be able to run Half-Life 2? That's all I'm wondering...

Re:Is that an official distribution?

[paulhar]

Maybe a gal wrote them? Would that be ok?

Re:This article is all wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

exactly what do the slashdot editors do all day?

Moderate people down who disagree with them, of course.

Re:vendor asshats

[mofochickamo]

It sucks when a vendor won't consider supporting their products in OSes that don't have massive market share...

Welcome to my world.

Steve Jobs.

Darl MacBride comments :

[borgdows]

"They have pulled off Linux support at our request.
If they had continued to offer Linux support, we would have sued them for IP infringement about using Linux to develop drivers for the illegal Linux platform."

Re:possible answers?

[mahdi13]

WOW! That is a great FAQ!

Looks just like the one they put up last Fall!
Oh wait...it is!

Re:NVidia vs. ATI

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Just grab the GLX and Kernel [4363 is latest] tar.gz's. Unpack them, export IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH=true. go into the Kernel directory, make, go into the GLX directory, make, go into /etc/X11, edit XF86CONFIG-4 [e.g. remove dri, etc.. replace nv with nvidia], add nvidia to your /etc/modules now either reboot or isnmod nvidia and launch startx. Boom NVIDIA drivers.

That is exactly why I bought OSX. ;)

Re:Radeon is supported by XFree86 team

[paranode]

From the ATI Linux FAQ:

"ATI actively assists qualified 3rd party Linux developers writing software for the majority of ATI products by providing them with development kits and information. We have also made every attempt to provide hardware 2D acceleration for all shipping products and will continue to assist XFree86 developers with their work."

Re:possible answers?

[Monkelectric]

As a university SysAdmin, we had a couple computers with ATI "all in wonder" cards. Students needed to be able to do video capture for their research. Long story short, in 98 the ATI drivers crashed the machine non-stop. The Win2k drivers were a little better -- but every 2 months or so, the drivers would just *quit*. The machine wouldn't capture. The first time it happened, I furiously worked on the machine, reinstalled drivers, manually deleted them and their reg keys, did a PNP reset ... NOTHING did any good. The only thing that fixed the card was reinstalling the OS! *and THAT* only lasted another 2 months until the drivers gave up again! It got to the point where the students would walk up to me and say "It happened again", and after that, they stopped even bothering me, and they just reinstalled 2k themselves!

Would you like to start a ATI hate group together ?

Duties of a Slashdot Editor

[The Famous Brett Wat]

You said:

...why don't slashdot editors do some sort of background checking. What are they being paid for?

They get paid to select the stuff from the submissions bin that goes on the front page. No, wait -- that's done by a squadron of stealth monkeys. Um, maybe the editors feed the monkeys?