Hari's Corner

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Commending ATI

Filed under: Software and Technology by Hari
Posted on Sat, Jul 15, 2006 at 08:53 IST (last updated: Wed, Oct 29, 2008 @ 22:34 IST)

I have often criticized hardware manufacturers in the past for poor Linux driver support. In particular ATI's support for its video cards had been extremely poor in the not-too-recent past. However, all that is a thing of history now. I recently downloaded the latest version of the ATI proprietary driver and felt a bit apprehensive about how it would work, considering that I had the latest version of xorg and that I hadn't tried installing the ATI driver for a long time now.

What really impresses me is the improvements they've made over a period of time. Their latest driver supports all versions of Xorg upto version 7.0. The distro-independent graphical installer (which also has an option to create distro-specific package for the driver) works like a charm and the fact that there's very little manual tweaking now required to get 3d acceleration to work is something that comes as a great relief. And the fact that the installation of this driver no longer removes the older X configuration which assures that you can still use X and remove fglrx if things go bad. This is really something great. The other great thing about the installer is that it can also work in the command line without X as it comes with a ncurses interface too.

I managed to get version 8.26 installed on Debian etch. Obviously a couple of reboots are required for the 3d acceleration to be fully functional. Once for running aticonfig which creates the relevant ATI device section in xorg.conf and another for the fglrx module to load successfully thus enabling 3d acceleration. I don't know a way around the reboot since trying to insert the kernel module manually didn't work for me the first time.

To make sure that 3d acceleration is enabled after installation run fglrxinfo from a terminal. You should get this kind of message: 
display: :0.0  screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: RADEON 9600 Generic
OpenGL version string: 2.0.5879 (8.26.18)
All in all, this has prompted me to make a blog post about Linux after a long, long time. More coming up! Watch this space. :)

3 comment(s)

  1. I have to agree with you, Hari! ATi have vastly improved their Linux driver, and I was shocked at how easy it was to install on Ubuntu. Shocked. There was no tweaking involved whatsoever - just a few commands and it was up and running ;)I still think nVidia's driver is more advanced, but I must give ATi credit where it is due - they are now putting a lot more effort into the development of this driver, so kudos to them for that! :D

    Comment by J_K9 (visitor) on Mon, Jul 17, 2006 @ 06:31 IST #
  2. Glad to hear you say that, I'll be installing ATI's driver to my Xubuntu laptop when I get a few minutes. . .

    Comment by Dominic (visitor) on Wed, Jul 19, 2006 @ 02:58 IST #
  3. Hey, thanks for the comments.On my monitor, it signals off and then on again when I issue "startx" but that's only a small thing with the new driver.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Thu, Jul 20, 2006 @ 16:03 IST #

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