ati drivers fail -- migrating to ubuntu

[Kevin Abbey]

Thank you Bruno,

I agree with your comments.

However, I think that the AMD proprietary driver does work already in
all of these fedora versions.  I am under the impression that the
install and build procedures within the driver packages are flawed for
fedora builds, thus the maintainer has not attended to this for 2
years or I have not found the correct documentation as to how to
complete the build and install correctly.  As I mentioned earlier I
spent some time to extract the package and find the section to build
the kernel module.  I built it ok but did not get through the rest of
the build package and did not successfully load the module.  I did
notice some problem with an option "verbose" within one of the build
files.  This caused the the build to run on using 100% of the cpu and
never completing.

The proprietary driver installed for me on Ununtu 9.0.4 with no
problem.  So I am leaning in the direction that in the proprietary
driver, the section to build the driver for fedora is broken.  I can
understand if AMD could not support the development kernel but the
person that maintains the build section in their distributed driver
package is not in AMD.  How does he get this to work?

Kevin






On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 6:21 PM, Bruno Wolff III<bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 07, 2009 at 15:38:48 -0400,
>  Kevin Abbey <kevinabbey at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'd am reluctantly migrating to ubuntu since ati drivers still do not
>> install in fedora 9, 10, or 11.  I have tried installing the
>> proprietary ati driver almost every month for the past year and a half
>> with no success.
>
> If that is your expectation, Fedora isn't the distro for you. Fedora is
> not going to hold up kernel development to wait for propreitary video
> drivers to be released. Both its focus on "first" and on "freedom" are
> in conflict with waiting for propreitary video driver updates before updating
> the kernel (or perhaps other things) that conflict with the propreitary
> drivers.
>
> Instead Fedora's plan is to use open source drivers to provide 3d
> acceleration for most Intel and ATI based video. Currently there are
> issues with these drivers, but they are working in some cases. In the
> long run this approach is supportable, whereas depending on propreitary
> drivers while trying to be leading edge, isn't.
>
>> I hope that fedora get a new maintainer for this and coordinates
>> updates with fedora and redhat and ATI,AMD.  If I find the time to
>
> That isn't going to happen.
>
>> Alternatively, I'll be using only NVidia cards in the future so that I
>> can use fedora.
>
> You are going to be in the same boat there, from time to time. And the
> open source driver project to support nvidia's chips isn't being helped
> much by nvidia, so it is going to be a long while before it supports
> 3d acceleration.
>