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Fedora Core 5 (Bordeaux) on a dv8000

ATI Proprietary Drivers

I have been meaning to write about the ATI proprietary drivers for sometime now and was hoping to report positive results. However, as they say in research, even negative results have their place since it lets others know about the avenues taken and forsaken. So, the bad news, and the raison d'etre for the installation of the ATI drivers in the first place, is that direct rendering does not work on a 64 bit OS, or at least on Fedora Core 5. There you have it. After days of trying to get it work, they simply do not. All is not lost however as you can still get 2D acceleration just fine with the ATI drivers. The 3D will not work and any application that relies on the same will also not work.

There is a lot of bad advice out there and I did track most of them down and tried them all. One of the reasons for staying away from proprietary drivers is that you do not know what the innards are. So, you are left to guess at why something does not work. So, I tried systematically by a process of elimination to see where the breakdown is. I commented out almost everything from the X configuration file, /etc/X11/xorg.conf and then tested the system. In all cases, as soon as you enable DRI in that file, the system display will go blank. The interesting thing is that it will seem to be running just fine. You can check this out by logging onto the system remotely and look at the log files: /var/log/messages, and /var/log/Xorg.0.log. However, I did find one interesting thing. When you enable DRI, you will see success in loading it. But, you will also see that all cards in /dev/dri/* are systematically tried even if they do not exist. Also, the logfile will end very close to where it says that DRI loading is a success. If you disable DRI, then the logfile will show the loading of all the ATI extensions all the way to the Syntapic touchpad. You will see something like:

ProcXCloseDevice to close or not ?
SynapticsCtrl called.
SynapticsCtrl called.

at the end of the Xorg.0.log file. You will not see the above when DRI is enabled. So, I do not know the source of the blank screen. There are a lot of claims of success out there, mostly on 32bit OSes. There are some claims of success on Gentoo for the 64 bit Linux. You may want to experiment. I have not done that.

Let me tell you how to go about installing the drivers from ATI. Download them from ATI support and then chmod the file to make it executable. After you do that, excute it thusly,

./ati-driver-installer-8.26.18-x86_64.run

The installation is easy, simply accept the defaults. After you do that you will need to run the ATI initialization script "aticonfig". However, you will note that it does not find the appropriate link libraries. So, you need to create a file called fglrx.conf in the directory /etc/ld.conf.d/ and add the following lines in it:

/usr/lib64/fglrx
/usr/lib/fglrx

Save this file in the above directory. Once you do that rerun ldconfig. Now you can run the initialization program as follows:

aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf

However, you will need to modify this file before you can use it. If you do not, you will get a blank screen on start-up. So, make the following changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "fglrx"
Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
Option "PseudoColorVisuals" "off"
Option "NoDRI" "yes"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "ATI Technologies Inc ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE)"
EndSection

If you do not turn off the display of pseudo colors, you will note that xine will crash on start-up and in fact will take down gdm with it. Once you make these changes, save the file and reboot. It is important to reboot since the kernel module has to be loaded prior to restarting X. Or, you can modprobe the kernel module fglrx and then startx. I find it easier to simply reboot.

There you have it. Days of frustration distilled to a few lines on the web. Hope it is helpful to you. And if you find a way to get 3D acceleration working, drop me a line.

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