July 3, 2007 — As I mentioned in the previous page, the wireless installation went OK. I was now ready to take the plunge and apply the solution to installing the ATI proprietary drivers and get direct rendering. Before I could do that I wanted to do some housecleaning. So, next I decided to get rid of all the i386 installed RPMs. You can do this many ways. But the one I use as suggested by Jesse Keating on the Fedora-test-list is to simply to
yum remove \*.i?86
This will get rid of all the packages that are either i386 or i686. This in itself is fine. If a specific piece of software requires these packages, yum will download and install the required packages. So, there is not much to worry about here. I then upgrade all my installation since I was sure there would be a new update to the kernel at a minimum. I was right and
yum update
produced close to 400 updates. This took some time.
Now I was ready to install the last known Xorg package that is compatible with the ATI drivers. I whipped out my old Test 1 disk. That was the only version I still had around. Michael had managed to get it working on Test 2. However, I had not downloaded that version. From this disk I installed
rpm -U --oldpackage xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.2.0-1.fc7.x86_64.rpm xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.6.3-1.fc7.x86_64.rpm
This installed fine. I then added the line
exclude=xorg-x11-server-*
to the /etc/yum.conf file. This will prevent future updates to the server. I am hoping that this modification will be short-lived and that the next update to the ATI drivers will fix the issue with the current Xorg server.
I downloaded the latest driver from the ATI website which at this writing is 8.38.6. I ran the command
sh ati-driver-installer-8.38.6-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Fedora/F7
which quickly created the 5 rpms you need. I then installed them all. This is where I hit my first snag. The ATI configuration file
I also download Celestia and Penguin Racer ans ran them and the results were fine. They worked fine as well. See the screenshots.
I then installed the Freshrpms repository for F7. This is delightfully easy to do. There is a link to the repo file directly from the website. So it is a matter of simply clicking and installing with the software installer. From there you can install the various plugins needed to play mp3 music or movies. I did
yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly
yum install dvdrip
yum install vlc libdvdcss
To do that. They work fine in this incarnation of Fedora as well.
Well, there you have it. Direct rendering is working. Fedora 7 is working as well. I am not sure what the effects of downgrading the Xorg server will be. So far, my system seems stable. I have firefox working fine including the flash player with the nspluginwrapper. You can read about it in my article on firefox. There are minor changes to the menu, for example, the Terminal has now moved from Applications -> Accessories to Applications -> System Tools. The default installation of course has a prettier face as I pointed out in my review of Test 4.
