Re: Debian support of ATI video cards
Hi All & James,
who inquires after ATI drivers & Debian Tux.
I have a Radeon 9000 Por & I am running it via the dri-sourceforge
stuff. Tiz nice.
I used Synaptic to do the dirty work & it is a honey of an app. Well
done to the geeks that put that beastie together.
There are "official" ATI drivers for this card too.
I am but a geek of not great skills & have been unable to install them
on this boxen. I tried the alien thang, but then I get a bunch of other
errors. The updated 2.5.1 getz me further than the 2.4.3, but not all up
& running.
The "official" drivers support 8500/9000/9500/9700 in all there various
flavours.
Hereabouts is a useful site, that has a forum for ATI & Tuxian's....
http://www.rage3d.com/board/forumdisplay.php?s=a70fd4e81874761b0f54b36d5678adb8&forumid=61
I use it too.
This week my focus has been else where, so I am staying put since I have
ok 2D support, but not the 2D/3D quality I get in DozeXP.
Next week, we will see.
Good luck dude.
Greek Geek :-)
"You've got an anti-anti-antimissile missile? Well, we've got an
anti-anti-anti-antimissile missile!" -Get Smart
James R. Van Zandt wrote:
I'm trying to decide what video card to get in my next computer.
ATI summarizes their Linux support here:
http://mirror.ati.com/support/faq/linux.html
They say they have a driver with 2D acceleration only for:
RADEON 9700
RADEON 9000
RADEON 8500
FireGL Workstation products
but that XFree86 already supports "most ATI graphics adapters". The
XFree86 site (http://www.xfree86.org/4.2.1/Status6.html#6) says
"Accelerated support is provided for Mach64, Rage, Rage 128 and Radeon
chips by the "ati" driver" but they don't specify 2D or 3D
acceleration. I guess this code is in
xserver-xfree86_4.2.1-4_i386.deb?
For 3D acceleration:
At their web site (http://mirror.ati.com/support/driver.html) ATI
offers an RPM file (fglrx-glc22-4.2.0-2.5.1.i586.rpm) with a driver
supporting these cards under XFree86 4.2.0:
RADEON 9700
RADEON 9000
RADEON 8500
Can that RPM be installed in a Debian system with alien?
Is there a Debian package? (I couldn't find one.)
If not, do the files from the RPM overlap those from
the xserver-xfree86 package? Other packages?
ATI points to the DRI project (http://dri.sourceforge.net/)
for drivers to support:
RADEON
RAGE 128
RAGE PRO
with Debian packages at http://people.debian.org/~daenzer/dri-trunk/
However, the Rage PRO at least is apparently five years old. In a 1998
review Tom's Hardware says
(http://www17.tomshardware.com/graphic/98q1/980121/3dbench-37.html):
"So what's with the ATI Rage Pro chip? I can't help it, but this chip
lacks in too many cases to be worth a recommendation. It does not
support GLQuake's or Quake II's OpenGL engine, it has obvious problems
with Direct3D, it has got only very weak support of professional
OpenGL under NT, so that it doesn't leave much else than its excellent
2D performance in combination with its video in/out features."
Hardly a glowing recommendation.
Do the Debian packages of the DRI software have any support for the
newer adaptors?
Maybe I should get an NVidea card after all. I understand there are
no open-source accelerated drivers, but there are binary drivers, and
I see we have these packages:
nvidia-glx-src - NVIDIA binary XFree86 4.x driver
nvidia-kernel-src - NVIDIA binary kernel module
- Jim Van Zandt
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