ATI Driver Schedule

[anachronism]

I know that ATI is quite unreliable with Linux drivers, however, how soon are drivers released, either open source or proprietary? I recently installed an HD2600XT and was wondering how long I'd have to wait until a driver would be available. I'm stuck with MESA drivers and its really quite attrocious for everything except basic images and text. Is there a better option than MESA, since ATI, Radeon, or ENVY will not work?

[SheeEttin]

Re: ATI Driver Schedule

Well, ATI's dragging its collective feet on getting real drivers for Linux, and as Phoronix put it, "One bug a day keeps AIGLX away", meaning they release new drivers semi-regularly, but rarely do anything useful in them.

If you need to install the fglrx driver, may I recommend my installer script?

[Snowhog]

Re: ATI Driver Schedule

If you need to install the fglrx driver, may I recommend my installer script?

From that location:

Please don't try and use it just yet, I haven't tested anything except the help message. (And the grep command, but...)

So, have you finished it, or is it still a "Please don't try and use it just yet" script?

[anachronism]

Re: ATI Driver Schedule

Thanks.

I tried the GLRX drivers when I first installed the card, it just gives me a blank screen after reboot. I'll just stick it out until drivers become available, it is quite a new card.

[SheeEttin]

Re: ATI Driver Schedule

So, have you finished it, or is it still a "Please don't try and use it just yet" script?

Oh, it's as finished as software projects get, meaning I work on it from time to time.
That bit is from the original post. I've updated it twice, keeping the old posts for posterity.

As for anachronism... If you want, we can help you troubleshoot your problems. It's probably not that the card is too new (Radeon-baseds are all pretty much the same). My money's on a problem with your xorg.conf or installation.
But, if you want to hold out for newer drivers, you'll likely be waiting a long time.

[anachronism]

Re: ATI Driver Schedule

I went through and tried again, I installed the restricted linux modules and the fglrx driver. After a reboot, I got a screen saying that X Server couldn't be started so I logged in through the command line I was given and edited back my xorg.conf to 'vesa' as the driver and gdm restarted fine. I went through and tried each of the variations (ATI RADEON fglrx, fbdev, vesa) but each with the same result, except that vesa gave me a GUI but only 640x480.

Neither proprietary nor open-source drivers seem to work with this card.

I could always plug into my on board graphics when I'm in Kubuntu but I don't want to have to go into the bios each time I end up loading Windows since I do play the occasional game.

Any info that I can pass along that might help with a possible work-around?

[SheeEttin]

Re: ATI Driver Schedule

Yep. Start up a bad session, switch to a terminal, and say "startx" (after logging in, of course). This'll give the reason it's not starting. Post the output here.