about the linux ATI proprietary drivers writers team
heavytull
drivers for linux that are quite a lot more buggy and a less fine than for
windows?
i've never seen any bug under windows, while the one for linux seems to be
even less reliable than the open source one.
the acceleration is really aweful in linux and why these drivers make the
backlight flashing twice at the launch of the X window?
this shortens the lifespan.
under windows and with the open sourc driver for linux the backlight is
switched off and switched on again only once at the start of the graphical
interface or X window.
Shadow_7
> drivers for linux that are quite a lot more buggy and a less fine than for
> windows?
They are buggy. But they are specifically designed for odd distros like
RedHat, and SuSE. Under debian, the one main issue I've had is that Mesa
OpenGL library overrides the ATI one. Even when building debs from
the ati installer, I still have to manually replace /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2
with the file from /usr/lib/fglrx/diversions/libGL.so.1.2.
dpkg-divert --list | grep -i "fglrx"
If you don't do this, then X uses the Mesa acceleration (software) to do
the rendering.
glxinfo | grep -i "direct"
Should show:
direct rendering: Yes
glxinfo | grep -i "^opengl"
Should show(or something like this):
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon Xpress Series
OpenGL version string: 2.1.7170 Release
And NOT Mesa if you want DRI acceleration. And otherwise use the ATI
drivers, and not the mesa ones.
But I digress, they are buggy. Especially if you venture into things like
xinerama. The main bug of late is that the cursor gets a little whacked.
Unfortunately they are even buggier on newer versions of X. But seem a
lot more stable / usable on the older versions of X.
When I first started using the ATI drivers on my Radeon Xpress 200M 5595
(PCIE) it would only work in 24 bit colors. And is otherwise picky about
what options are in your xorg.conf. Which aticonfig is not very good at
modifying IMO. But better than nothing I guess.
With the radeon open source driver, I have more color modes and more
resolution modes available for use. Under the ATI driver, I'm quite
limited in those regards. Not that I've used the radeon driver lately.
The main issue I had with the radeon driver was that the 3D acceleration
was virtually non-existent. But it was nice to have more resolution modes
available so things didn't get so stretched out when Cntrl+Alt+[+]-ing
through the modes. This 1280x800 display is quite weird looking at some
of the traditional resolutions. Anyway enough rambling.
HTH
Rikishi 42
> I would like to know whether it is normal that ATI releases proprietary
> drivers for linux that are quite a lot more buggy and a less fine than for
> windows?
They have *much* more Windows users, so they'll get much more feedback and
bug reports.
> the acceleration is really aweful in linux and why these drivers make the
> backlight flashing twice at the launch of the X window?
> this shortens the lifespan.
Huh?
Worries about acceleration, I can understand.
But having a flash at the start of X. Why would you care about that, unless
you're starting and stopping X all the time?
--
There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying.
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
Douglas Adams
Rikishi 42
>> I would like to know whether it is normal that ATI releases proprietary
>> drivers for linux that are quite a lot more buggy and a less fine than for
>> windows?
>
> They are buggy. But they are specifically designed for odd distros like
> RedHat, and SuSE.
Odd distro's ?
Please...
> When I first started using the ATI drivers on my Radeon Xpress 200M 5595
> (PCIE) it would only work in 24 bit colors.
I see. You'd be the kin of person that find CD sound to low of quality, too?
> The main issue I had with the radeon driver was that the 3D acceleration
> was virtually non-existent. But it was nice to have more resolution modes
> available so things didn't get so stretched out when Cntrl+Alt+[+]-ing
> through the modes.
Out of sincere curiousity: do you change the resolution that often? Why?
Shadow_7
> On 2008-01-28, Shadow_7 <wwwSh...@yaNOhoo.comNULL> wrote:
>
>>> I would like to know whether it is normal that ATI releases proprietary
>>> drivers for linux that are quite a lot more buggy and a less fine than for
>>> windows?
>>
>> They are buggy. But they are specifically designed for odd distros like
>> RedHat, and SuSE.
> Odd distro's ?
>
> Please...
Yes, odd. As in the tldp.org need not apply. Since they've moved or
renamed things, or otherwise scripted them to death.
>> When I first started using the ATI drivers on my Radeon Xpress 200M
>> 5595 (PCIE) it would only work in 24 bit colors.
> I see. You'd be the kin of person that find CD sound to low of quality,
> too?
Actually I do find CD quality sound too low. But I'm a trombonist and
like my trombone to sound more like a trombone than a synthesizer. But in
term of video, I prefer 16 bit so I get better performance. I'm a little
color deficient so it's not like I'm gonna miss a few million colors that
the monitor couldn't accurately reproduce anyway.
>> The main issue I had with the radeon driver was that the 3D
>> acceleration was virtually non-existent. But it was nice to have more
>> resolution modes available so things didn't get so stretched out when
>> Cntrl+Alt+[+]-ing through the modes.
> Out of sincere curiousity: do you change the resolution that often? Why?
Because firefox doesn't come with a zoom feature (that I know of). So
when someone posts a fairly low res picture of themselves or some alumni,
I can Cntrl+Alt+[+] to zoom in on the pic. Otherwise I'm looking at
something the size of a postage stamp, or desktop icon. Using a change
in resolution to zoom is easier/quicker than having to save as and
open it in a picture viewer capable of zooming. Plus when I'm checking
email first thing in the morning and my eyes aren't quite focused yet,
it's nice to make the thing bigger without having the bring the lcd of the
laptop within 5"'s of my face. Or restart X with a different dpi setting.
And then there's pogo.com with their 640x### java applets, that are just
to small to play well without zooming in. And minesweeper in expert mode
that suffers a similar fate.
Since you asked.
Anton Ertl
>With the radeon open source driver, I have more color modes and more
>resolution modes available for use. Under the ATI driver, I'm quite
>limited in those regards. Not that I've used the radeon driver lately.
>The main issue I had with the radeon driver was that the 3D acceleration
>was virtually non-existent.
What graphics card are you using? The last status I know is that the
radeon driver has 3D acceleration for all the cards it supports, and
on the cards I have tried (Radeon 9250, 9600, 9600Pro, X550, X800GTO,
X850XT) it works nicely, although slower than the Windows driver (see
<2006Dec1...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>
<2007Feb...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>).
- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed
an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
Bit Twister
> What graphics card are you using? The last status I know is that the
> radeon driver has 3D acceleration for all the cards it supports,
Not well enough in my case.
RS480 [Radeon Xpress 200G Series] (on board)
Module: ATI Radeon 9500 - X850
Flightgear is useless under the new drivers. Mandriva release 2007.1
proprietary driver worked pretty good.
Shadow_7
>> radeon driver has 3D acceleration for all the cards it supports,
>
> Not well enough in my case.
> RS480 [Radeon Xpress 200G Series] (on board)
> Module: ATI Radeon 9500 - X850
>
> Flightgear is useless under the new drivers. Mandriva release 2007.1
> proprietary driver worked pretty good.
For me ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE) and the fglrx driver. Aside from
some MSI quirk thing so PCIe doesn't seem usable. Not that a mention of
MSI can be found in ATI's expanded driver pack. So it probably doesn't
support PCIe anyway. Anyway the radeon driver did not support 3D
acceleration for it as of late 2006. Some odd r300 or r400-ish chipset.
I haven't checked lately, but up until recently my ATI drivers really
fowled things up. And I wasn't able to successfully revert to the radeon
driver. Some details below.
One recent upgrade issue I had with the ATI drivers was that things got
moved around. Some /etc/fglrx... files were overriding the newer
/etc/ati/... files. And some /usr/lib/xorg/... files were overriding the
newer files in other locations. Granted that I used to install via non
distro specific means and had to revert to distro specific means when the
ati installer started failing to run in a non distro specific manner.
i.e. locked up the computer on one of the prompts. Although that might
be because I tried to upgrade to a 64 bit linux on a box which turns out is
NOT fully 64 bit.
I was eventually able to get it working again after about three months of
using the vesa driver at 1024x768 on my 1280x800 LCD. Quite anoying I
might add. But I had to otherwise move/remove a number of files. The
list below. Basically follow the remove old packages methodology before
installing new packages. Because the ATI drivers are NOT self cleaning.
So waiting through a number of new driver releases was not enough to fix
the issue in this case.
The remnants manually removed. Now I still got a cpu race condition if I
ran java applets with sound enabled. Which stopped when I disabled sound
which was designed into the applet(s). i.e. pogo.com even after moving
these files. But I could get 1280x800 again. And DRI again, to a limited
extent.
/etc/fglrxprofiles.csv
/etc/fglrxrc
/usr/lib/xorg/libatixutil.a
/usr/lib/xorg/libfglrx_dm.a
/usr/lib/xorg/libfglrx_dm.so.1.0
/usr/lib/xorg/libfglrx_gamma.a
/usr/lib/xorg/libfglrx_gamma.so.1
/usr/lib/xorg/libfglrx_gamma.so.1.0
/usr/lib/xorg/libfglrx_pp.a
/usr/lib/xorg/libfglrx_pp.so.1.0
/usr/lib/xorg/libfglrx_tvout.a
/usr/lib/xorg/libfglrx_tvout.so.1
/usr/lib/xorg/libfglrx_tvout.so.1.0
/usr/lib/xorg/libGL.so
/usr/lib/xorg/libGL.so.1
/usr/lib/xorg/libGL.so.1.2
Basically these existed in multiple locations. And the ones above had the
oldest date/time stamps. Being 2006 in my case while fixing the issue in
late 2007. Not to imply that they are the only remnants. But I
identified them and removed them, and was able to get the ati drivers
usable again.
In the meantime I have 1.1G's of .debs downloaded for my new install.
With probably a gig or more left to download over dialup. In order to
make my new install (debian/stable) up to par with my old install
(debian/unstable). At least in terms of the number of and the name of
packages installed. Most every game plus every development tool
available. Thank god for shell scripts. Set it and forget it.
I somehow got this list from dpkg-divert. Which helped me identify that I
was using the wrong libGL.so.1.2 file for ATI. Perhaps I should check
some of the others. But I remembered that I had to play with libGL.so.1.2
anyway from my previous attempts to get DRI from the ATI drivers working
about a year earlier when I got this new laptop and set it up.
libatixutil.a
libfglrx_dm.a
libfglrx_dm.so.1.0
libfglrx_gamma.a
libfglrx_gamma.so.1
libfglrx_gamma.so.1.0
libfglrx_pp.a
libfglrx_pp.so.1.0
libfglrx_tvout.a
libfglrx_tvout.so.1
libfglrx_tvout.so.1.0
libGL.so
libGL.so.1
libGL.so.1.2
NOTE: You have to undo any changes to libGL.so.2.1 to get the radeon driver
working again. Needless to say I've adopted a policy of moving files
instead of removing them these days. With a slight modification in file
name to reflect their original paths. And maybe a date/time and a reason
why I moved them. So I have these in my main users home directory.
usr_lib_fglrx_diversions_libGL.so.1.2___FGLRX
usr_lib_libGL.so.1.2____________________MESA
HTH
Dragomir Kollaric
Sorry to change the direction of this thread. I've posted my problem
before, but I got no answers to it.
The problem is with the LCD Monitor and when I boot up the PC it
remains dark, after the OS (Ubuntu Studio 7.10) is up and running I
get a log-in, I can also switch to the console (Ctrl+Alt+FX 1-6) but
the fonts are huge about 10 mm high, this means that vim for example
displays 22 lines.
Using Gnome (but mostly XFCE) I get a bunch of vertical lines about
half of the monitor, from the bottom up.
Now I took some screen-shots with gimp, and lo and behold, on the
pictures taken there are no such lines to be seen, (looked at them
on another PC with another OS on it.
How does it work that gimp takes a picture of the screen, but it
doesn't capture the fault?
Dragomir Kollaric
--
Q: Do you know what the death-rate around here is?
A: One per person!
Shadow_7
> remains dark, after the OS (Ubuntu Studio 7.10) is up and running I
> get a log-in, I can also switch to the console (Ctrl+Alt+FX 1-6) but
> the fonts are huge about 10 mm high, this means that vim for example
> displays 22 lines.
If it remains blank on a console, you probably enabled the framebuffer,
but didn't include or load the modules at boot time.
If it remains blank in X, then your X is misconfigured. Or you're using
the wrong video driver. Or possibly the video driver sucks. Or your
HorizSync and VertRefresh values are off in your X configuration.
# X -configure
# X -config /root/xorg.conf.new
# cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
# aticonfig --initial (and some other options, google for your card)
# X -config /etc/X11/xorg.conf
(if all is well exit to your user and startx)
NOTE: Cntrl+Alt+Backspace to exit X.
(assuming it's responding and the keyboard didn't flake out on you)
> Using Gnome (but mostly XFCE) I get a bunch of vertical lines about half
> of the monitor, from the bottom up.
Sounds like X or your video driver is misconfigured. Check
/var/log/Xorg.0.log for any details to shed some light on it for you.
I've had that happen myself. Gimp grabs the right stuff because it's
talking to X and the problem exists between X and your video card. Not
between X and your applications / processes. Sort of the same way screen
shots don't work if your media player is using your accelerated drivers,
but does work if you output using x11/shm.
HTH
ERACC
> Because firefox doesn't come with a zoom feature (that I know of).
You just don't know where to look I suppose. Try this addons search:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=zoom&status=4
Enjoy!
Gene (e-mail: gene \a\t eracc \d\o\t com)
--
Mandriva Linux release 2007.1 (Official) for i586
Got Rute? http://www.anrdoezrs.net/email-2546588-42121?isbn=0130333514
ERA Computers & Consulting - http://www.eracc.com/
Preloaded PCs - eComStation, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenServer & UnixWare
Shadow_7
> On Mon, 28 Jan 2008 10:42:46 +0000, Shadow_7 wrote:
>
>> Because firefox doesn't come with a zoom feature (that I know of).
>
> You just don't know where to look I suppose. Try this addons search:
>
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=zoom&status=4
>
> Enjoy!
> Gene (e-mail: gene \a\t eracc \d\o\t com)
Well, I haven't had much of a need to look for that since linux / X already
has a built in zoom (Cntrl + Alt + [+/-]). Sure I could address it on a
per application basis. But it's just a lot more convenient to switch
resolution modes on the fly.
And that plugin doesn't work for sylpheed, gimp(has it own zoom, not a
plugin), mplayer (yeah, I know of -vf scale -zoom -x ### -y ###). For the
pogo games in question, it's not the text I need bigger. And it's not
quite good enough to go 2x's for 800px on a 1280px wide LCD. So having
various resolutions to bump through helps. If your video driver supports
it.
And there's also the matter of aspect ratio(8:5 for 1280x800 aka 1.6)
as opposed to (4:3 for 1024x768 aka 1.33) which can be corrected in some
video modes. Without having to jump through additional hoops.
Anton Ertl
>On Mon, 28 Jan 2008 10:48:40 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:
>
>> What graphics card are you using? The last status I know is that the
>> radeon driver has 3D acceleration for all the cards it supports,
>
>Not well enough in my case.
>RS480 [Radeon Xpress 200G Series] (on board)
>Module: ATI Radeon 9500 - X850
>
>Flightgear is useless under the new drivers.
Yes, I have tried this now on an X850XT, and it gets maybe 0.4fps. I
have also tried it on my 9250, and that gets around 30fps with the
default settings (and in 1600x1200 full screen). With the X850XT the
r300 subdriver warns about supporting some feature only in software; I
guess that's the reason for the slowdown (the 9250 uses the R200
subdriver). Maybe that problem is fixed in a newer version; I'm using
the versions included with Debian Etch (Mesa DRI R300 20060815 TCL;
for the 9250 the DRI driver is Mesa DRI R200 20060602 AGP 4x TCL), and
apparently not in the version included with your Mandriva 2007.1
distro.
Darren Salt
> Bit Twister <BitTw...@mouse-potato.com> writes:
>> On Mon, 28 Jan 2008 10:48:40 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:
>>> What graphics card are you using? The last status I know is that the
>>> radeon driver has 3D acceleration for all the cards it supports,
>> Not well enough in my case.
>> RS480 [Radeon Xpress 200G Series] (on board)
>> Module: ATI Radeon 9500 - X850
>> Flightgear is useless under the new drivers.
> Yes, I have tried this now on an X850XT, and it gets maybe 0.4fps. I have
> also tried it on my 9250, and that gets around 30fps with the default
> settings (and in 1600x1200 full screen). With the X850XT the r300
> subdriver warns about supporting some feature only in software; I guess
> that's the reason for the slowdown (the 9250 uses the R200 subdriver).
For R300, it's a good idea to use driconf to switch on the "disable
low-impact fallbacks" option (if you can). There's an image at
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon which shows a few other settings,
coincidentally for use with flightgear (though the top one's hidden).
> Maybe that problem is fixed in a newer version; I'm using the versions
> included with Debian Etch (Mesa DRI R300 20060815 TCL; for the 9250 the DRI
> driver is Mesa DRI R200 20060602 AGP 4x TCL),
I get that same R300 string here, despite the fact that what I'm using is
recent testing/unstable. (
[snip]
--
| Darren Salt | linux or ds at | nr. Ashington, | Toon
| RISC OS, Linux | youmustbejoking,demon,co,uk | Northumberland | Army
| <URL:http://www.youmustbejoking.demon.co.uk/progs.packages.html>
I call my computer Hole in the Desk
Anton Ertl
>I demand that Anton Ertl may or may not have written...
>
>> Bit Twister <BitTw...@mouse-potato.com> writes:
>>> On Mon, 28 Jan 2008 10:48:40 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:
>>>> What graphics card are you using? The last status I know is that the
>>>> radeon driver has 3D acceleration for all the cards it supports,
>>> Not well enough in my case.
>>> RS480 [Radeon Xpress 200G Series] (on board)
>>> Module: ATI Radeon 9500 - X850
>>> Flightgear is useless under the new drivers.
>
>> Yes, I have tried this now on an X850XT, and it gets maybe 0.4fps. I have
>> also tried it on my 9250, and that gets around 30fps with the default
>> settings (and in 1600x1200 full screen). With the X850XT the r300
>> subdriver warns about supporting some feature only in software; I guess
>> that's the reason for the slowdown (the 9250 uses the R200 subdriver).
>
>For R300, it's a good idea to use driconf to switch on the "disable
>low-impact fallbacks" option (if you can).
I have now tried that on the box with the X850XT, and can report
success. Flightgear now gets 27-42fps and is playable on that box.
>There's an image at
>http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon which shows a few other settings,
>coincidentally for use with flightgear (though the top one's hidden).
The numbers above are just with "disable low-impact fallbacks".