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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?"
Looks like they answer a lot of Linux questions in the FAQ.
Mike
Since ATI gave them the technical specs.
http://www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_ati. html
ATI's Alexander Stohr still works on these drivers (and is a lurker of the dri-devel mailing list.)
Lastly, why don't slashdot editors do some sort of background checking. What are they being paid for?
Sunny Dubey
My radeon driver came with Red Hat 8 so while ATI might not support linux Red Hat did.
Check here for more information. I am not sure though.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
"Discontinued products" simply means they aren't manufacturing them any more, i.e. anything that isn't in the current "Products" section.
ATI XFree Drivers have always been written by third parties. ATI does not support them and never has. They merely provide specs to open source developers who in turn write drivers. nVidia, OTOH, actually writes drivers, but keeps the source closed.
So you have to decide the between the lesser of two evils, I guess.
My journal has hot
Linux Drivers for ATI products
ATI actively assists qualified 3rd party Linux developers writing software for the majority of ATI products by providing them with development kits and information.
I take it this means to say they'll help out if someone wants to write Linux drivers for their products, but they're not committing to writing Linux drivers themselves.
http://www.slo-tech.com/clanki/03032/03032en.shtml
Sunny Dubey
Speaking as someone who just installed Knoppix and the Nvidia drivers you're full of it.
/etc/X11, edit XF86CONFIG-4 [e.g. remove dri, etc.. replace nv with nvidia], add nvidia to your /etc/modules
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
now either reboot or isnmod nvidia and launch startx. Boom NVIDIA drivers.
It took me a while to figure that out [specially the IGNORE_CC part] but once I did I had no troubles installing the files.
All in all if you know what you are doing it takes 3 minutes to install the drivers and GLX portions.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The "Discontinued Products" page has nothing to do with Linux drivers. "Discontinued Products" simply means everything except for the current line-up (Radeon 9800, 9600, and 9100); these are no longer being manufactured, but they are still supported.
The removal of the binary-only Linux drivers (not to be confused with the "radeon" XFree driver) is news to me, though.
This page tells you how to compile ATI Radeon support plus DRI/XV into X.
Now I don't know (or have I tried) anything about their Radeon support. I simply don't have a Radeon card. But if it works as well as the Rage and AIW, then these are definitely the drivers for you!.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
but there are opensource third party drivers that work exclent with ATI's. I have a Radeon 9000Pro 128MB and I use the Gatos Drivers (http://gatos.sourceforge.net) with dri from http://dri.sourceforge.net and I get exelent performances. It is a bit difficult to understand which is the right package first, and how to install, but when you finally get it, it works great. I use it now with kernel-2.4.21. They also have links to a page where you can download a utility to control the tvout and the dual-head features.
By the way, if one want's the real ATI drivers, one should get the FireGL drivers, which I already confirmed, they are still on the site, as always were. Those were the only Linux drivers ATI ever had in its site.
Onda Technology Institute
Hmm....
Please give the output of glxinfo and ensure you are actually using DRI.
A "properly" installed DRI does not use 0666 so you may not have permission to access the DRI devices, in which case your glxgears run is testing your CPU.
A Dell Inspiron @800MHz with a Mobility M3 (R128 model) pumps out 450-500fps on glxgears, but only 180 without DRI.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
The Xfree86 status page for ati shows accelerated support for the newer ati chips.
Maybe ati sent them the specs?
Read, L
Dude, it's a Radeon, not Raedon..
And if that was just a typo, you're blind; there's a BIG "DRIVERS" button on the www.ati.com front page. Click that. Then from the lists, select "Graphic driver," "Windows [whatever version]," and then "RADEON Family."
The page works in Firebird, and IE. If you're using Opera, or some other browser, switch to IE and give it a go there.
Gawd.. How the hell that post was "Insightful" I'll never know..
Here are drivers for Radeon, (I had bookmarked the link before they changed their site) but it seems that they are the fireGL drivers anyway (fglrx-glc22...), and they are for XFree 4.1.0 or 4.2.0, not 4.3.0.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Funny.
I was curious, and tried their website, which is much better than it used to be, now it is like nvidias.
Lets see-----Graphic Drivers, Linux, 8500.
Funny, their are drivers there. Sure, they are a little old, but whatever, ATI always has old drivers on their site.
Then, lets see. Where I usually go---
Fire GL, Linux, FireGL 8800
The new drivers---> Both packages above are the fglrx drivers. Both unofficially are supported on the Radeon 8500 through the Radeon 9700.
Get a life, people. ATI driver support has not changed. They have always unofficially supported linux in this fashion--->if their drivers cost you $10,000 in hardware, thats your problem. I'll bet that NVIDIA's 'official' support, however, has a liability wavier associated with. The only difference is that NVIDIA supports their card, if their driver fries it, while ATI will not.
But, I've never seen any device's driver fry the hardware from its manufacturer.
Besides, which of these two manufactures releases the specs on their cards? Which of these two manufactures has active open source drivers in development? ATI has been MUCH better to the linux community than Nvidia.
Even if their hardware/drivers are slightly buggier.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Please update the front page... I know that slashdot is a timesink, and severely decreases productivity. Yes, I realize it also has a healing effect on the damage psyches of those addicted to reading it every so often. However, this story reaches a new low.
Some dude, who's failed to spend a couple of days figuring out what's really going on posts an inflammatory and stress inducing story on the front page of this green rag.
From posted comments (no I never read slashdot comments) there appear to be binary drivers and XF86 drivers available.
An update on the front page would probably save abou 358,654 hours of wasted time by slashdot readers.
http://www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_a
For the original radeon and close derivatives (radeon mobility M6, M7, mobility 7500, and IGP 320M/340M but not regular radeon 7500 or anything above), the way to get TV output is to boot the computer up with the TV plugged in, and run atitvout. This program clones the normal display onto the TV. All acceleration features that are normally supported on the display are also supported on the TV.
For radeon 7500 and above, a different technique is required: there you simply boot up the computer with the TV attached, and TV output is automatic. But, if you want to run X on the TV output you must use the VESA driver and not the radeon driver. Consequently the card's acceleration features are not available in X on the TV output. However, as a special case, video playback overlay acceleration is available on the TV out using the xvidix driver in mplayer.
Basically, the situation is not ideal, but it is a long way from being hopeless.
I've read through this thread and read "ATI is great and you're a moron" and "ATI sucks and YOU'RE a moron"
Let's review:
ATI's website has been revamped. Completely replacing a website this large in place is, one would expect, nontrivial. We can expect a few glitches here and there. It's not like some guy at GeoCities unveiling his new "Pamela's Yummy Tits" website. It's certainly NOT worthy of this level of discussion (term used VERY loosely) when the simple fact is, as you're about to see, it's all about
After reading all about the horrors facing innocent Linux-using high-end Radeon owners, I did the unthinkable: before posting ANYthing I visited the site for myself. I know, I know, the ancient Greek method of simply thinking about something and then expounding on it rather than actually sullying ones' self by investigating
First I went here.
Then I clicked the big link called "DRIVERS". That brought me to here.
In the left pane I clicked "Graphic Driver". The pane to the right of that then presented an array of choices. I chose "Linux" and then from the pane just to the right of that I chose "RADEON 9700 PRO".
And what did I find after clicking the little red and quite intuitive "GO" button?
And there you go. Emergency over. After reading all the pure CRAP in this thread I must say it was a bit of a letdown.
And for those a bit braver, beta drivers for X 4.3 can be found HERE If you want to know what the deal is with these drivers (which are much newer than the ones on the main ATI site) just head over to HERE and you'll find lots of comments made by people who have (*gasp!*) actually USED the drivers instead of just making uninformed and mostly WRONG sweeping statements about them on Slashdot.
I apologize. I don't normally post things this mean-spirited but watching this thread unfold just kind of disgusted me. So many people ready to spout whatever bullshit pops into their minds, so FEW people who take a look at what's actually going on
Mod me down all you want. In this case I really, really very honestly don't care.
MS is paying less than the cost of manufacture for the integrated chipset/graphic controller in the xbox. See this report and scroll down to the Microsoft Agreement heading. Microsoft also needed changes to the encryption keys hard coded into the chipset and left Nvidia with almost 10 million chips that they couldn't sell at all. They settled on February 6, 2003 with Nvidia agreeing to help further reduce the costs of making the current xbox. Just a couple of months later, MS announces they are partnering with Ati for the xbox2 design. Don't be fooled into thinking that nvidia made money on the xbox chips.
I now think that when microsoft describes a company as "partner", they really mean "loss leader subsidiary" or "biatch".
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I agree with that. The "advice" is utterly useless for 99.9% of people - too complicated. But - what if the poster had provided a shell script that downloaded the latest kernel, GLX and whatever and did the install?
Like this instead:
I have an installer for the nVidia drivers here: http://blahblah.com/linux/nvidia.sh [root@localhost]# ./nvidia.sh
This installer will download and set up Nvidia's drivers for Linux.
Checking dependencies...OK
Downloading missing dependency: Foo-3.4.5...OK
Downloading missing dependency: Bar-6.7.8...OK
Building new kernel with nVidia support...OK
Building new GLX with nVidia support...OK
Building new XFree86 with nVidia support...OK
Adding nvidia to your modules...OK
Starting nVidia drivers...OK
Completed! You should be able to type "startx" now and get nVidia accelerated X11!
Seriously - instead of rambling on in English what the poor user should do - say it in a language that matters: shell script. If you can't do so - because you don't know if the script will work yada yada - then your advice probably won't work either.
"Not Supported" has been replaced with links to linux drivers. So I would say that complaining on Slashdot is much more affective than contacting customer service :)
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
Divers would not install because the installer app didn't know what OS you were running.
I have had to deal with this too - just manually install the winXP drivers and hope it dosn't break anything.
Open Firmware drivers (usually in the form of a Mac-specific firmware revision) are generally only needed for:
- drive interface cards (ATA, SCSI) if you are booting from them.
- video cards if you want Open Firmware to be able to use them at boot time (command-option-o-f).
- ethernet cards if you want to netboot your machine.
- anything else you want to use as a boot device unless Open Firmware has a built-in driver for it.
Basically if you want the device to be able to be controlled by the boot firmware (which isn't necessary to use the device once the OS has actually loaded), you need an OF driver. Otherwise, you don't.120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
Yeah except the FireGL X1 offers dual DVI not to mention more support options, you don't only pay for hardware sometimes
I checked when the story was first up. It said not supported. But after a lot of angry e-mails (I'm sure) they put up some non supported ones and let the good times roll. BTW, how's it feel to be wrong?
I just downloaded the Raedon drivers for linux, for X11 4.2 ... dunno buddy.
would someone check pefore posting this trash on slashdot's main page?
Binary only linux drivers tend to break, and if the company doesnt want to support its "old" products on new versions of linux, you are screwed.
You are completely correct that on Linux binary drivers tend to break. The interesting thing is why this happens: Linux developers don't care about binary compatibility. They don't try to preserve it. And it's as simple as that.
Now, depending on your viewpoint, this is a good or a bad thing. If you only like open source, then hey, fuck binary only drivers (and live with the consequences or don't use them). If you're developing closed source binary drivers or you don't care about open source / closed source (eg, you just want something that works) your life is a pain in the ass.
For this to change either the open source zealots will win, and all software will be open sourced, or hardware manufacturers will decide they no longer need to keep drivers closed source. It doesn't look like other will change anytime soon.
I really don't use Linux for game playing. I use Linux to work in. Without the open source from Red Hat it whould have been a 16bit world and that really sucked because I do some graphics work in Linux, not much mind you but a little.
Since I never use Red Hat for gaming I just never looked. It was nice to be able to boot to Linux with 24bit options and screen sizes of up to 1280 x 1024.
What games do you play on your Linux box?