Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (600 mails)

["David C. Rankin" <drankinatty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 10 October 2009 08:08:14 am Carlos E. R. wrote:
> On Saturday, 2009-10-10 at 12:14 +0100, MasterPatricko wrote:
> > Carlos E. R. wrote:
> > > Wasn't AIT bought by AMD and opensourced?
> >
> > Not exactly. ATI was bought by AMD, and then some information was
> > released, but only the _specs_ to the new generation of cards was
> > opensourced, not the original ati proprietary fglrx drivers.
> > Based on the released specs the radeonhd driver is in development but
> > its right now only got 2D support (not 3D) for most cards.
> > At some point in the future hopefully it will be fully supported, but
> > that time is still a long way away for now.
> > The proprietary fglrx drivers are currently still the only way to get
> > full 3d acceleration on ati/amd cards on linux.
>
> Ok, then it is not the fault of users if we /have/ to use the propietary
> drivers. It is the "fault" of opensource devs that they haven't completed
> the job...
>
>     >:-P
>
> (... some bait... :-p )

Same old song, fglrx drivers are DEAD for any card older than the 2400 series 
cards on anything newer than openSuSE 11.0 :-( The 9-3 release was the final 
release from ATI when it declared all pre-2400 series cards "legacy" cards and 
dropped all Linux support.) In actuality the 8-9 release what the last working 
release that didn't suffer performance problems, but that only supports xorg 
<= 7.3. The 8-10 through 9-3 drivers support xorg 7.4, but of those, the 9-3 
driver is the only one bandaided enough to stop your machine from 
spontaneously rebooting on X startup. 

If you have a pre-2008 laptop that means no kde4 desktop effects (or they will 
start but shut down to save resources ever time you try to use the effects).

Big impact to all laptop users who can't swap cards. You will need to swap 
laptops. Lesson learned -- no more ATI.


-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
Rankin Law Firm, PLLC
510 Ochiltree Street
Nacogdoches, Texas 75961
Telephone: (936) 715-9333
Facsimile: (936) 715-9339
www.rankinlawfirm.com
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