Ubuntu 9.10 -- ATI

[Dave McCarty]

The older desktop that my mother-in-law uses has an ATI Radeon RV200 QW
video card whne I updated to 9.10 all that appeared was the top menu bar
and a black screen, I thought I would have to reset all her desktop
icons, etc. However when I tried to add programs to the desktop nothing
changed.
I finally went into Appearance and reset the visual effects to None and
the previous settings all appeared. I haven't spent time trying to fix
it since as long as she can get to the news on line she is happy.

Dave

[Dan Falconer]

I am currently having a similar issue with my laptop, in that I do not appear to have the correct video drivers active anymore.  I have no idea how to determine what video drivers are being used by KDE, which only makes things more frustrated.  I've had issues with this and another ATI card getting the correct drivers loaded, and it had a lot to do with the X config file (I believe).  Hopefully either myself or another loyal LUG follower will have time to look through the archives or wherever to get more info on the driver thing.

As a side note, I used to love ATI for the fact that they seemed to be pretty good cards with comparable (or sometimes better) capabilities than their nVidia counterparts.  After my experiences with them in Linux, I now detest ATI.  Am I wrong here?

--
Best Regards,


Dan Falconer
http://CrazedSanity.com || http://www.Buzzkill.org

[Eric Wanchic]

That's a little hard to answer.

On the linux side, nvidia has always had more support/compatibility over
ATI. Now, I believe the Open source community is writing "better"
drivers than ATI, but this might be only for their newer products. This
started happening more after AMD bought ATI, (I think that's right?) I
personally haven't kept up on this.

Now, for ATI, I've always had problems, whether Linux or windows. On the
windows side, it seemed I never got the full functionality out of my ATI
card like I felt I should. I did some video editing with them as well,
rarely gaming - mostly because it never worked right. Technically, I can
thank ATI because they're one reason I'm not a gamer. ATI was always so-so.

But I know people that really like ATI cards, and definitely rave about
them over nvidia. So maybe it's me? Maybe a lack of patience on my part?
Who knows.

I personally like nvidia, either Windows or linux, it just works for me!
My new laptop I bought; I made sure it was an nvidia. So I do sympthaize
with you and other ATI laptop users. My older work laptop is also an
ATI, and it stopped working (in 3D accelerated mode, that is) after 8.10. :(

Good luck with that.

Eric

FYI, I purchased a pre-built computer from government surplus to use as
a TV/Netflix box. It does have a low-profile ATI card - SVHS TV-out that
came with it. So far it's working, but I'm only using it in Win XP right
now. I do have plans to dual boot with ubuntu, but it's a low priority
at the moment.

[Dan Falconer]

Thanks for your insight, Eric.

Does anybody out there know of a good resource (or several) for information on video for Linux?  Configuring/installing drivers, configuring X to use them, and anything else related.  It seems to me there is quite a gap in knowledge when it comes to video and video drivers (the technical aspects of them).  Like the Linux crowd doesn't really care as long as it works, leaving a big gap for people to fall into when it doesn't.

[Dave McCarty]

Was the site (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1305349) I
mentioned earlier any help? It had some info on xorg config files.

[Robert]

The way I see it, there has been so many changes recently in the kernel
and in xorg that a lot of the docs that are out there are probably out
of date.

I agree that decent documentation is scarce, but (and this shouldn't be
taken as an apology for them) things have moved along quite a ways in
the last few years. X is so much easier to get running than it was a few
years back, but like everything, if you want to hot-rod it then you need
to read more than just the end user docs.

ATI specifically, their de-supporting some older chips last year meant a
whole bunch of us were left out in the cold when it came to the
proprietary driver. However, the open source driver is a lot better than
it was too. I can make my screen real-estate change shape without a
reboot, and I can switch on gpu clock scaling so my work lappy does not
sit all day with the fan whirring. However, I did loose all the fine
grained acceleration gui config stuff that came with ATI's driver.

I would look at the radeon and xorg.conf man pages, look at xrandr,
http://planet.freedesktop.org/ for blogs of the some of the xorg
developers, and then there is that new graphics rendering stuff in the
kernel (whose name I cannot remember right now) that I think is there in
9.10 for you to mess with.

good luck
Robert

On Thu, 2009-11-05 at 10:02 -0600, Dan Falconer wrote:

[Dan Falconer]

Dave,

I went through the afore-mentioned site and downloaded the drivers, eventually building what I *hope* were proper packages.  The installer supports Ubuntu, even 9.04, but not 9.10 or karmic, so I built them for 9.04 and installed.  I can't really say if it worked or not... my desktop loads, though it is a bit quirky due to running metacity instead of kwin...  I can't get any 3d games to run, so that seems like it is a vote for "you done it wrong, boy", but there again I can't say for sure.  I have no idea what driver is trying to run.  When I changed the xorg.conf file as first suggested in the site's thread, it caused KDE to act funny and (in very subtle ways) not update portions of the screen.  Reverting to my saved backup copy (which is **incredibly** small) fixed the issue, so it does seem to be using that file still, contrary to what one of the users indicated.

Robert,

Thanks for that insight.  :)  Yeah, I know I'm runnin' on the bleeding edge, and I know that means I gotta read through more stuff.  The problem was simply that I didn't know what that "more stuff" part was.  Some places refer me to a proprietary driver, some to the open source driver, each using (interchangeably, I might add) the terms "Radeon", "Catalyst" and "FGLRX".  One radeon driver previously installed seemed to completely destroy my drivers--I had to use the CLI (*gasp*) to remove the proprietary drivers, do an ancient-voodoo-rain-jump-around-in-my-underwear-with-specific-charms dance to get the darn thing back up.  Some of the drivers that don't outwardly reference fglrx do so internally, while some seem to condemn that series of letters like it might cause contraction of Yersinia pestis.  And possibly the worst part was that at one point I had both proprietary and open source drivers installed, without any idea as to which one was running.

I've done a lot of work with Linux and administration of them (even Unix).  I can build a non-graphical Linux box with a blindfold on while three schizophrenic monkeys gnaw on my right arm... but I have a hell of a time dealing with getting the finer points of the graphical stuff working.  I can rebuild a database from the ground up and restore corrupted data to 99% of its original integrity in a fraction of the time it takes to figure out the video stuff.

I hope y'all enjoyed my ramblings.  And maybe after all this is done, provided I get enough info, I'll create a special section on my website for it. ;)