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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?"
I've given up on ATI because of their crappy drivers. Sure the drivers are no longer the huge bottleneck that they once were, but it's all still a big mess on Windows, and they are real bastards about just being upfront and posting decent Linux drivers for download. Since buying my Radeon 9700 Pro I have had numerous problems trying to run games on it under Windows XP and Mandrake Linux, and at this point, I'd rather just lose some performance and go back to running Nvidia cards with detonators.
Before you post stories to Slashdot and stirring up the masses, why don't you try to contact ATI customer support either through email ? That seems to be much easier, and much more productive, than taking up front page space.
The lack of support by vendors makes it real difficult for people to really have confidence in Linux, and makes them keep that partition with that other OS on it.
Just over the past month, I've got a digital camera that isn't supported. Actually, I think I nearly fried it trying to get it to work, but that's another story. Then I went looking for a 6 in 1 adapter for it. As I was browsing through the store and on the net, I was thinking to myself "If just *one* of these dang things said it supported Linux, I'd buy it!".
There's a market for vendors for people who don't want to compile major parts of an operating system like the kernel, X etc.
Hey vendors, this is a growing market! Come on in, the water's fine!
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
That's how it has been for years, mostly. But if you haven't noticed more and more people, companies, and governments are using Linux lately. There is no indication this trend will stop. Hardware companies might be able to ignore Linux for another year or two, but beyond that they do so at their peril.
Don't worry--more, not fewer, companies will be supporting Linux in the future.
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.
WOW THAT'S SO SIMPLE I CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHY ANYONE USES MICROSOFT
Look at what we see: broken nVidia drivers, broken ATI drivers.
Let us suppose, just for a minute, that ALL DRIVERS SUCK.
They are all broken, in some way or another. All companies push stuff that isn't ready out the door, especially "stuff that can be fixed in software".
I look at it this way - I would rather have an honestly broken, open-source driver with a public buglist, than a closed "oh, it's ready to ship" driver that you can get no help on at all.
At least then I can work on it in my spare time, to try and get it to play nicely.
I just bought a Radeon 9800. Why? Because I think that when you take away nVidia's driver cheats, ATI has the superior hardware. Can I use it right now? Nope. But, I have a spare box with an AGP slot, source code for the R200's, and some free time. Maybe I can get it up and running and help out a bit. The kernel stuff should already work fine, considering that the ATI drivers don't require a kernel patch to work.
So, in short - all software sucks; open OS's just give me the ability to make it suck less, and that's why I prefer them.