On Thursday 16 July 2009 05:03:17 pm leee wrote: > On Friday 17 Jul 2009, James J. Brennan wrote: > > I have purchased a new Dell laptop which has an ATI Radeon > > Mobility HD 3670 vido card installed. > > > > I've placed FEDORA 11 (32 bit) on it and downloaded Flightgear > > which fails to run. (I also tried the Fedora 11, 64 bit version > > with the same result) > > > > Problem is that the drivers that I have do not support hardware > > accel. > > > > I've downloaded what I think is the correct driver installation > > package from ATI, but after installing it I lost the video > > display! > > > > (What I have is " ati-driver-installer-9-5-x86.x86_64.run ".) > > > > I uninstalled it (with some difficulty) and now have the display > > back, but (of course) Flightgear still is inop. > > > > Has anyone had any luck in getting this card to work? > > Any thoughts will be appreciated! > > > > jj > > > > http://kingmont.com > > > > P.S. I sent this to the developers list, but it was suggested > > (tactfully I might add) that this might be a better place. > > I saw your posting to the dev list and can't say that I thought > you'd get a better response on the user list. I guess it's just > possible that other users might have found a way to get ATI's linux > drivers working properly but personally, I doubt it. While the ATI > hardware seems pretty good they _still_ seem to be incapable of > writing a Linux driver that works and provides full OpenGL 1.x > functionality ,let alone OGL 2/3 features. > > Sadly, this isn't just a recent thing; I was beta testing the linux > version of a proprietary 3D package quite a few years ago and after > hitting driver related problems I got a few > development/experimental drivers from ATI to try out. Funny thing > is that they eventually delivered one driver to me that worked, and > I reported back to them about it, but all subsequent versions > failed as before and none of the officially released drivers ever > worked. Go figure. In the end I got fed up with peeing into the > wind and just getting my feet wet, and bought an nvidia card so I > could actually do some work. > > Since then I moved the card to a backup workstation and have used > the Xorg ATI radeon driver wit it, which while still not supporting > the full OGL feature set, doesn't crash out X11/Xorg like the ATI > drivers used to do. > > With a laptop though, the option of changing your video card just > isn't there and in any case it seems that there have been chip > packaging problems with nvidia cards such that any that were made > between roughly six months, to about two years ago, are quite > likely to fail after a year or two (this has been quite well > documented in some of the specialist IT press). > > All in all, it sucks big time; The nvidia drivers work pretty good > but unless you've got the latest packaging the hardware is likely > to fail, and ATI hardware, good as it seems to be, just doesn't > have viable linux drivers. > > You can either try the Xorg drivers, which may or may not support > your particular vid chip, or trawl through all the forums of people > trying to get the proprietary ATI drivers to work in the hope of > getting lucky. That the proprietary ATI drivers _can_ work is > beyond doubt, but getting them to work on all systems still seems > to be hit and miss, and will certainly need you to do a fair bit of > work digging around in the innards of your Xorg config, along with > sorting out conflicting OGL libraries. > > Sorry I can't be of more help. > > LeeE
LeeE's experience reflects how bad things were for the ATI drivers a few years. They were total crap. Since AMD purchased ATI things have improved significantly but there is more work that needs to be done before they reach parity with NVidia. But they are closing the gap and it appears that they are serious about linux support. The HD 3670 is a R6xx GPU and none of the open source drivers have full 3D support for the R6xx series yet since AMD released the programming docs for these GPUs only a few months ago and it takes time to get this stuff working. So the only option is to use the proprietary drivers and as you found out these can be difficult to get working. Your best bet is to find a forum that deals linux video and ask there. Have you tried on the phoronix forums? I know that the AMD/ATI forum there is frequented by actual AMD/ATI developers and even the manager of the program posts there on occasion. Hal ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list Flightgear-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users
