On 12/10/12 04:05 PM, Roman V.Leon. wrote:
The issue is that their proprietary drivers may (accidentally) involve patented code belonging to a competitor or it may involve code they are attempting to keep secret hoping to get a competitive edge. Either way, they don't want their competitors to know what their doing. This is the dark underside of the competitive model. There are too many secrets to be kept.On 12.10.2012 23:13, Steven Rosenberg wrote:On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 5:57 AM, Darac Marjal<mailinglist@darac.org.uk> wrote:I had the same issues I had even pined a kernel version in /etc/apt/preferences to avoid rebuilding the fglrx-driver, but in the end it didn't save me.On Tue, Oct 09, 2012 at 09:43:32PM +0400, Roman V.Leon. wrote:Gents and Ladies :-) please advise. I have an HP notebook with Ati Radeon 4200 GPU on board and sometimes i like to play old good windows games with help of "wine" while my little daughter is sleeping. But recently a real disaster had happened, ATI dropped a support of Radeon 4xxx cards and after update i was oblige to install a radeon driver instead of fglrx. Unfortunately this driver doesn't allow me to play Heroes of MM V. I tried to return to previous version of fglrx-driver(from snapshots.debian.org repo), but didn't succeed in it because driver depends on many packages including Xorg and so forth. I also tried fglrx-legacy-driver from experimental repository, but it hangs my system. Could you suggest please what steps i should do to manage my radeon working as it was before. My debian version is wheezy, current version of radeon driver which i see in the repo is 1:12-6+point-1.^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ FYI, I don't see this version at http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=xserver-xorg-video-radeon Did you install the non-free firmware along with the radeon driver? Did "Heroes of MM V" report any errors or is performance simply lacking?I have this chip in my Lenovo G555 laptop, purchased in March 2010. When I first got the laptop, I was running Fedora 13, and I eventually tried the fglrx driver. The whole thing was a nightmare. It seemed to break with every kernel update. Trying to manage it outside the normal package management was not easy. (It didn't help that the maintainer of fglrx for RPM Fusion was months behind at that time.)I finally moved to Debian Squeeze using the open-source radeon driver, and things have been great ever since. I'm not a gamer, I grant you, but performance of the radeon driver has been excellent. I'm running Wheezy now, and it's still performing great.It is really important because i can't eat, i'm always in a bad mood, i'm bad with women and i'm suffering from insomnia without my old good games :-))) Thank you in advance.If it's that important to you, why not install Windows alongside Linux and boot into it to play the games?I second the other comment -- for big-time Windows games, keep a small Windows installation on your system.Thank you Steven and Darac, I think you are right, it will be the best I can do in this situation. If be honest of course games are not a real problem for me, but I just can't understand Ati's politics. I can't understand why is free support, I mean those people who make open-source driver, is much better than commercial support, it's beyond me. I beg your pardon for my English.
The open source drivers work better (in terms of integration with the X server) because the maintainers can adjust them to the latest changes in X and other graphic software. Unfortunately due to the problems noted above, they can't keep up with the proprietary drivers in terms of performance with the latest cards.
It's possible this situation may change in the future for two reasons. One is that AMD is trying to open more of its source. The other is that the superior open source development model may eventually lead to drivers that are superior to the closed source ones providing that the licences follow the GPL which would prevent them from being included in proprietary software.
This is a key advantage that the GPL has over the BSD and similar licenses. Open Source work stays open.