ATI 8.8 under 64-bit Linux
I’ve been conflicted of late with the newly released 8.8 drivers for ATI cards. I have both an X1950 Pro in my home machine (under Windows XP) and an HD4850 in my work machine, however the 8.8 drivers just refuse to work under 64-bit Linux, no matter how many times I compile them. The 8.7 drivers work fine though, so it’s not a total loss when it comes to getting things like Compiz and the Cairo dock working (and the cylinder deformation looks rather spectacular across two monitors).
However, the 8.8 drivers introduce crossfire support under Linux (OK, so I don’t really need this just yet, but a 3rd monitor could be useful), and also support overclocking of the graphics card. Some of the other bug fixes would be nice, but I can live without them until proper support is forthcoming.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
can you give more information(Distro, version), you don’t need to compile the driver, just build the package, I have debisn sid for amd64 with this driver working with an asus m2a-vm with a chipset 690G(X1250) the way I install it is as super user:
in order to see if your distro is supported you can do this:
./ati-driver-installer-8-8-x86.x86_64.run –listpkg
if you don’t see your distro, may it’s not supported, but if you see it there, run the next line replacing Debian/sid with the name and version of your distro, you most have all the dependencies to build the package as shown here:
./ati-driver-installer-8-8-x86.x86_64.run –buildpkg Debian/sid
then install the packages created by the binary, in my case with debian:
dpkg-i *.deb
with rpm distros like fedora:
rpm -i *.rpm
then build the module for the kernel in order to enable 3d direct rendering:
m-a prepare
m-a update
m-a build fglrx
m-a install fglrx
You must have module-assistant installed to do this.
August 29th, 2008 at 10:41 am
I’m running Linux 2.6.24-19-generic #1 SMP x86_64 GNU/Linux (Ubuntu 8.10) on an Asus P5F Pro motherboard, with dual monitors on the HD4850. The problem seems to be that when I use 8.8, Xorg throws a DRI error when trying to load the driver, claims that 3D support is not available (but 2D is), then fails to actually initialise the graphics driver (so I get a black screen). Virtual terminals are not available either (ctrl-alt-f1/f2 etc) so I can’t switch and see what’s gone wrong - all I can do is boot into a root shell and check log files in the terminal.
The fix is to reinstall the 8.7 driver (./ati… as root), then copy back over a working xorg.conf file that I happen to keep to hand.
I’m going to try your suggestion right now - and building fglrx failed…
“Reinstallation of fglrx-kernel-source is not possible, it cannot be downloaded.”