On Thursday 25 June 2009 12:29:11 am Susanne Oberhauser wrote:
"David C. Rankin" <drankinatty@suddenlinkmail.com> writes:
Now for openSuSE, currently there is no upgrade path beyond 11.0 for users effected by the 8-10 to 9-3 driver issues, because the 8-9 driver does NOT support xorg 7.4. The only fglrx driver offering that opensuse has is for the 2400+ Series cards. (Guess how many laptops have 2400+ Series GPUs -- very, very few)
Did we ever discuss to build the current user space for the older X and kernel?
Susanne, I don't understand the technical issues involved enough to be of much use extracting the 8-9 driver and patching it to run on 11.1, but I can tell you it is something that should be seriously looked at or there are going to be a whole lot of laptop users with ATI hardware that are given the impression that Linux just isn't a serious desktop yet when 11.2 is released. I swapped drives tonight to do some additional testing of kde 4.2.95-1 on Archlinux working with the radeonhd driver. I pulled built and installed the latest git versions of drm/mesa and the radeonhd driver. Desktop effect performance is miserable -- to the point that the compositing manager shuts down when doing cube rotation because the compositing is too slow (or whatever the exact text of the message you get in the lower right of the desktop says) Earlier today (for the better part of the day) I was working on this same laptop with my drive that holds openSuSE 11.0/kde4.3 Beta 2 where I can still use the ATI 8-9 fglrx driver. Everything worked fine in kde 4.3 beta 2 with the fglrx driver. Performance was excellent, desktop effects worked perfectly, the only difference -- the fglrx driver instead of the radeonhd driver. The difference is Night-and-day. If I were a new user that loaded 11.1 or the upcoming 11.2 without having the benefit of the fglrx driver -- I would get the impression that Linux was just to bloated to run well on my hardware and probably ditch it. It makes that big of a difference. If Novell/openSuSE has any resources to look into what it would take to move the 8-9 driver forward to the current xorg for 11.2, or what options there are to negotiate with ATI to fix the issues introduced with the 8-10 through 9-3 drivers, it would probably be one of the best uses of time and manpower to prevent against 11.2 being a dud on a whole lot of laptop hardware. Keep the faith... -- 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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org