Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1002 mails)

[Stan Goodman <stan.goodman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 07/17/2011 05:00 PM, Michael Powell wrote:
> Stan Goodman wrote:
>
> > Since there is no available driver for the Intel HD Integrated Graphics
> > card on the Intel MB I bought last week, I've inquired about supported
> > PCI Express cards that I could install instead. My usual merchant
> > carries cards of Ndivia and ATI, and has in stock ATI HD3650.
> This is actually a fairly old card, if I'm not mistaken. Intel is working on
> ramping up their Linux support for your equipment. A great deal of it is
> already present in Git source code repositories for people who want to
> custom build the bleeding edge code. This support is right around the corner
> and probably will be beginning to get included in packaged distros soon.
> This is 'right around the corner', so to speak, and work is already under
> way for Ivy Bridge as well.

Since I wrote, I have found a web page that seems to offer a feasible 
path to installation of the ATI card, and is even SUSE oriented 
(http://forums.opensuse.org/forums/english/get-technical-help-here/64-bit/391836-drivers-ati-radeon-hd3650-suse-11-00-64-bit.html); 
the light dawns near the bottom. So if I go that way, installation seems 
less off-putting. After I discovered that the HD3650, although a Radeon, 
is not the Radeon that the <man ati> page means when it says Radeon is 
supported, things had begun to seem bleak.

But if you say that Intel support for their chip is "right around the 
corner", that opens up a more appealing possibility. Since you seem to 
know the neighborhood and its corners, and I don't, can you give us a 
clue of what "right around" means? And how confident your are about your 
estimate?

The driver that the system has chosen as its best shot is not impossible 
to work with, for simple purposes anyway. I can view film clips on the 
websites I use for news, and the Web in general is not suffering. The 
difficulty so far is pop-up menus that have an artifact that makes them 
hard or impossible to read (thin white bars, horizontal and vertical) 
obscuring the text of the menu; that has got to go. But I can tolerate 
it for a time, if I have some notion of how much time is involved.
> > A web search assures me that this card belongs to the Redeon series;
> > <man ati>  says that Radeon is supported, so I assume that this one is.
> Sometime back (before I bought Nvidia GTS-450) I was using onboard HD3300
> series IGP and later added a 3450. I had originally been using the radeonhd
> driver fairly successfully, but I had read the Catalyst (fglrx) drivers had
> been improving, so I gave them a go.
>
> I noticed the packaged binaries available from repos were outdated so I went
> ahead and downloaded the latest from AMD/ATI web site. Somewhere around 6-9
> months ago AMD/ATI began to make a push to get their Linux drivers to be a
> little more equal to the Windows ones. Starting about 10.3, or so, they were
> getting better almost by the month. They still hadn't caught NVidia yet, but
> the knew they were behind and you could see they were really trying.
>
> > He also has similar Nvidia cards. I am shying away from Nvidia because I
> > have seen over the years so many discussions about difficulties, perhaps
> > quirks in the available drivers, that make them seem like  avoidable
> > trouble. And yet I know that many buy and use them, so I am perhaps
> > exaggerating the risk. I'd be happy to read any comment anyone has to
> > offer about this.
> I am using a GTS 450 Nvidia card today. As much as the Catalyst (fglrx)
> stuff was steadily improving I almost wish I had stayed with AMD/ATI. The
> problem I had was that even though they got dual monitor support going
> again, in order to use it they used Xinerama (which is slow). When support
> for dual monitors was running 3D acceleration was automatically turned off.
> So you couldn't have 2 monitors _and_ 3D accel at the same time. Switched to
> the Nvidia about 4 months ago so I do not know if maybe this situation has
> changed (wrt fglrx) since then.
>
> I had used Nvidia 'Twinview' previously on an older machine with an AGP GT
> 6600 based video card and knew that it worked. With 'Twinview' (Nvidia
> Xinerama replacement) you don't lose 3D acceleration. Also the libvdpau
> support works fairly well and the AMD/ATI equivalent isn't quite "there"
> yet. The latest recent release of the Adobe Flash player for 64 bit even has
> support for the Nvidia libvdpau. IIRC the latest Nvidia cards (like mine and
> newer) also go all the way to OpenGL 4.x if used with the drivers downloaded
> from Nvidia web site and manually installed (which is what I do).
>
> Now for the bad news: I have been having a steady problem with NVidia
> drivers and the desktop effects under KDE 4.6.x. The last driver that works
> entirely correct is 260.19.44 and I had to patch a file in order to use it
> with kernel 2.6.39-2-desktop. It will not build on any newer kernels. All
> the newer Nvidia releases since then build and install correctly on any
> newer kernel but the Kwin desktop effects problem still is present. Even if
> I turn off desktop effects (better) I can still get some minor glitches in
> some window decorations. So I have been using the 2.6.39-2-desktop kernel
> and stayed with the 260.19.44 Nvidia drivers to keep everything "right".
>
> For me the greatest advantage Nvidia has is I can run dual monitors _and_
> have 3D acceleration.
>
> A new 275.19 dropped yesterday, and while I've already downloaded I haven't
> tried installing it yet. Just about to try that now....
>
> -Mike
--

Stan Goodman
Qiryat Tiv'on
Israel

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