Partha's Home

Fedora Core on a dv8000

ATI Proprietary Drivers

Well, finally!!! We now have 3D! Well, I must say that, that was a nice holiday surprise from ATI. ATI has finally fixed the problem with their driver and I am happy to say that the latest drivers from ATI work with the dv8000 without any changes in the BIOS, without adding any sideport memory etc. Whatever was the problem and we do not know what the problem was, it seems to have been rectified. We can now get harware acceleration on the dv8000. Let me recount here what I did to test out the new drivers.

I have been checking the various forums (see resources) and the ATI (see resources) website to see if they have new drivers for the ATI cards. Sure enough, a couple of days back when I checked their website, I found that there indeed were new drivers available. Thinking that I would be going through the motions again, I downloaded the new driver, version 8.32.5, and proceeded to install it and fully expecting that I will be faced with the blank screen again. Anyway, This is where I hit my first snag.

I ran the usual command

sh ati-driver-ati-driver-installer-8.32.5-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Fedora/FC6

and got the following errors

Generating package: Fedora/FC6
install: cannot stat `fireglcontrolpanel': No such file or directory
Package build failed!
Package build utility output:
....

So, I headed out to Google and checked out the "fireglcontrolpanel" error. As usual, there was a solution in the Phoronix (see resources) forum. Looks like the installer was looking for the qt-3.3 library in a specific location. There was also a solution to this issue. You have to make a symbolic link to the lib directory in the qt-3.3 directory to lib64 like so:

ln -s /usr/lib64/qt-3.3/lib /usr/lib64/qt-3.3/lib64

Once you make the symbolic link, rerun the above command and you should have 5 new RPMs in the directory where you built the package. Now, run the rpm command in this directory

ls -al *.rpm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10798831 Dec 17 09:08 ATI-fglrx-8.32.5-1.fc6.x86_64.rpm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 54307 Dec 17 09:08 ATI-fglrx-control-panel-8.32.5-1.fc6.x86_64.rpm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 120959 Dec 17 09:08 ATI-fglrx-devel-8.32.5-1.fc6.x86_64.rpm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5815994 Dec 17 09:08 ATI-fglrx-IA32-libs-8.32.5-1.fc6.x86_64.rpm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 256902 Dec 17 09:08 kernel-module-ATI-fglrx-2.6.18-1.2849.fc6-8.32.5-1.fc6.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh *.rpm

and your new drivers should be installed. You may get an error that libstdc++.so.5 is missing. If this happens then simply install that 32bit library

yum install compat-libstdc++-33.i386

Then you should be all set with the installation. Now we need to modify the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to take advantage of the new driver. You can now do

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

There you have it. we have the new drivers installed. You also do not need to add any particular option to the newly generated xorg.conf file. In the past I have seen that you had to fiddle with a number of tweaks. I didn't have to do any of that in this iteration of the driver.

We are not done yet. There are still a few caveats. For that we go to the next page. ..... --> Continued

...Home