AMD, ATI's parent company, has been promising better video driver support for the Linux community for the past year. While driver updates have been monthly and the ATI's fglx driver has gotten much better, development still has been slow, closed and proprietary. AMD has now decided to open source their drivers and has promised the these two things:
- To develop of a fully functional 2D and 3D driver that supports all of their newer radeon chipsets. This will be done in full collaboration with the open source community and will have the direct participation of hackers from companies like Red Hat and Novell.
- To release documentation that anyone can use to build and support drivers for their chips.
edited by pHreaksYcle
12 comments:
Hi Red!
Finally our Xpress' will show their real power with C-F. Some say it will work even 90% faster with linux native software. It's another time we can see that, for giant company, no user's prayers will do as much as money from another giant company.
Hope you forgive me my rubbish english :)
Kartofel Pl
Finaly!
Looks like I chose the right time to get back to Ubuntu Linux. Hopefully, things will turn out all right after all for my Inspiron1501 with AtiXpress1150.
And they said Ati support will never improve...
Hey RedDEAD, I'm an Ubuntu user on an older Dell Inspiron... unfortunately the machine doesn't work too impressively and I'm considering buying a 1501 - but I need to know, how fast does Ubuntu run on that machine? Does Firefox still have optimization issues? I really don't know what's Ubuntu's general problem and what is specifically a problem with *my* laptop; I want to keep using Ubuntu but I need someone to reconfirm for me that it *does* work relatively well and fast! If you - or anyone - read this please write to me hunt.topher@gmail.com, even if it's just quick... thanks... I'd really appreciate some confirmation from a 1501 user!
eee!! that's a good new...!
ps.- you never explained me what do you have to do to get the free Ubuntu stickers... =( (sorry,.. but i don't get what "Send a self addressed stamped envelope"... i'm from Chile)
Please!
Send a self addressed stamped envelope means, that you put an envelope with with you address and name with postage on it in another envelope that you send to the address.
Hopefully this means AIGLX support is right around the corner!
BTW, has anyone tried the new BIOS v.2.6.1, A14 yet? I want to get my backlight buttons working and if it's fixed in the new release, I don't have to downgrade.
digg just linked the 900 page open source GPU guide
http://digg.com/linux_unix/AMD_Releases_900_Pages_Of_ATI_GPU_Specifications
kinda interesting if you have ever worked directly with hardware...plus this means that we might get better drivers really soon!
Hey Red,
thanks for an awesome blog - your howtos have been a lifesaver. Just wondering how you generally approach distribution upgrades - do you go the clean install approach or do you use dist-upgrade? I wonder because of the wifi/ndiswrapper situation...I plan on doing a clean install to avoid problems with repositories/dependencies etc., and keeping my /home partition separate and untouched. I just wonder if there's a way to avoid having to re-load the ndiswrapper module.
Cheers
I go the clean install method, I'm not that great of Ubuntu user yet. I would have have problems with distro upgrading if I tried to upgrade. It's a great idea keeping your home folder on another partition, I don't and reinstalling is a pain. The ndiswrapper module will have to be loaded again thou. Good news is there is a native wi-fi driver that coming along and soon we won't have to use ndiswrapper.
I'm curious if the inspirion 1501 has enough 3d power to run quake 4 area.
I've just got one, and have working proprietary fglx driver, but quake 4 demo, even the smp version, is running at a pathetic 1 fps or so, with lots of screen distortion.....
Mike Täht
The Dell 1501 integrated graphic card is incredible weak. Great for Compiz, editing pictures & movies and older not as graphically intense games.
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