ati drivers fail -- migrating to ubuntu

Kevin Abbey kevinabbey at gmail.com
Mon Sep 7 22:26:35 UTC 2009


Hi,  Thank you for the reply Frank,


The opensource drivers work fine for a single monitor and 2D work.  I
support bio-informatics and computational biology applications that
require 3D and OpenGL support.  I understand that only the proprietary
drivers support this.  Since AMD released the API for the Radeon chips
it is expected that the open source radeon driver will get better in
time.  It would be nicer if AMD just merged their code with a license
that allowed external contributions.

In addition to the need for 3d support, I am using two monitors with
the Radeon 3850, 3870 and 4850 (each on a separate computer) so the
proprietary driver makes this easier to setup also.

The initial setup was with Fedora 8 using the 3850 and 3870.  It was a
surprise to me when I upgraded to Fedora 9 and the driver failed.
Then each month I tried again for months with 9, then again with
Fedora 10 and now 11.  Just to get a system running properly I
migrated to Centos initially  but the rpmforge is incomplete and out
of date for many packages in comparison the fedora and ubuntu
repositories.

I have Nvidia based computers also and their drivers have never failed
to install on any of the OSs.


The problem gets worse as AMD produces better chips and is gaining
market share.  The computers that we get a the university through Dell
and HP are using the ATI Radeon cards in the discounted systems.


I would love for the development at AMD to step it up a notch for
linux support not just for the Video support but also for their Stream
Computing SDK.  The GPGPU and Stream computing is of much interest and
the AMD chips are clearly better than Nvidia.  Unfortunately they have
yet to deliver and develop a community around this.  Perhaps with the
opensource OpenCL language this will all change for the better.
However, ATI,AMD still needs to produce a driver!!!  I am hoping that
the company achieves better financial stability and can develop a
strategy to support the linux community better.  Of course I could be
confused here since the driver fails on fedora only and not ubuntu.
It is unclear to me where the problem is exactly.


Kevin






On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 3:49 PM, Frank Cox<theatre at sasktel.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:38:48 -0400
> Kevin Abbey wrote:
>
>> I'm interested to learn opinions on this subject from the fedora community.
>
> What ATI card do you have?  The ATI Radeon X1950 Pro in this computer works
> great (and the X1550 that I had previously also worked great), WITHOUT the
> proprietary drivers.
>
> I installed F11 on this computer and everything "just worked", including the
> video (1680x1050 on this 22" widescreen monitor).  No need for any proprietary
> driver at all.
>
> Video cards are relatively cheap; perhaps you would be well advised to simply
> get a "good one" -- I can recommend either two models above because I know they
> work.
>
> --
> MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com
>




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