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Re: ATI Linux Driver Packages



On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 09:42:10PM -0500, Chris Cheney wrote:
> Are these drivers much better then than XFree ones or is there a reason
> to be promoting nonfree drivers? 

I recently bought an entirely new machine with a Radeon 9500 Pro in it. 
None of the XFree86 drivers in woody would run on it. (Please clue me 
in if there is one.) So as a result I downloaded the ATI RPM and 
alien'ed it into a Debian package. For the most part this worked fine 
but it complained about libGL.so.1.2 which appears to be owned by 
another package. (I am not sure which at the moment.) The new fglrx 
driver appears when you run dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86. 
You can run it this way if you do not use the Kernel framebuffer. 
The install scripts in the ATI package provide a XFree86 setup script, 
and this worked as well. Sadly none of the GL apps work well because the 
system does not use OpenGL Direct Rendering. This is probably due to the 
lack of a suitable DRI module in the kernel. As such I snagged the src 
for said module and tried to compile it using kernel-headers-2.4.18-686 
which appears to be the highest stable kernel available in Woody. My 
attempt to compile this using the make.sh script in the package returned 
an annoying "This Driver will not be compatible with the DRI in your 
version of the kernel, please use 2.4.5 or higher." So I haven't had 
much luck. Been at a loss until I saw this package discussion. I 
tried to install the package but dpkg found that the version number is 
the same as the one I alien'ed so it refused to install it. However 
since I have the hardware and the time to help out, I would be happy to 
use this machine as a test bed. Contact me personally, since it isn't 
appropriate for the list. It would be really swell to actually play 
Tuxracer for a change. ;-)

Thanks
-- 
Matthew P. McGuire <gray AT shadowglade.net> 1024D/E21C0E88
CB82 7859 26B2 95E3 1328  5198 D57A D072 E21C 0E88
          When choice matters, choose Debian.



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