Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 2, 2007 19:51 UTC (Sun) by gravious (subscriber, #7662)
In reply to: Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com) by tialaramex
Parent article: Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Hi tialaramex,

Thanks for the response. I am 100% sure that I have to get the very latest kernel.org (something I haven't had to do since I switched to Ubuntu - thanks guys!), patch it with the latest DRI stuff and get the very latest X.org and Mesa stuff. They're only the three scariest free software projects but what the hey. The reason I posted to the mailing list is because in order to "un-f*ck" this particular radeon chipset it seems that reverse engineering that fglrx driver from ATI (I mean AMD natch) is the way to go. This I do not know how to do and the instructions given here http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Radeon200M I think you'll agree are cryptic (I compared them to Albanian in my mail - more a dig at my lack of Albanian than a reflection on Albanian itself you understand). So I was hoping for some pointers. But you're right - git first, prod later - see ya.

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Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 3, 2007 6:27 UTC (Mon) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

Not that I'd know much about the projects except as an user, but I think it's usually enough to get the latest DRM kernel drivers and just compile them against the latest kernel, then take the latest X.org DDX driver (assuming one has a recent X.org, which Ubuntu 7.04 does not anymore have) and Mesa (from where the DRI driver comes from).

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Building is quite a good start for interested people, and I updated it some time ago since the instructions didn't work as such with my Ubuntu and it was useful to make some additions. It covers DRM, libdrm and Mesa DRI drivers, additionally one wants to get eg. git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/avivo/xf86-video-avivo for the R500/R600 DDX driver.

Though I think it may very well be one needs to install xorg-xserver from git too, since I've been hearing something about this new PCI infrastructure or something...