Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 2, 2007 12:48 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com) by gravious
Parent article: Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Yes, you're probably right to some extent.

One of the problems Free Software projects have is that there are often a lot more people who'd "like to help out" than actually bring some significant results. That's not because people are deliberately wasting project time, but often this sort of thing seems like a great idea on a rainy Sunday afternoon, and then by Monday evening after a long day's work you don't really have time for it. The result is obviously frustrating for existing part-time developers who may feel that they wasted /their/ weekend helping someone else who'll decide actually they need to weed the garden or take the kids swimming instead.

So developers tend to be reluctant to respond to vague "I'd like to help" posts unless the project has a built-in "Newbie task" as the Nouveau people do (or did when I last looked) in the form of their automated test software which everyone can run and report the results without needing supervision.

If you are a coder and sincerely want to help, I'd suggest you try (without bothering the list about it) to obtain a recent version of the code, build it and test it on your hardware, then report the results to the list, and if possible identify something you can do that would make this better for the next person and do it.

If you're a non-coder, there's some chance the project is in a phase where you can't help without using up precious developer resources, which unfortunately means that the best you can do is state your support and look for another project that's in a more suitable phase.

Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 2, 2007 19:51 UTC (Sun) by gravious (guest, #7662) [Link] (1 responses)

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.

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...

Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 6, 2007 12:48 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

I had a reasonably good experience with helping with the ATI drivers on my old laptop. As it turned out Google Earth triggered some unbeleivable bugs (drawing over random parts of the screen, clip rectangles broken, etc). I found the code relatively well laid out and was able to get into fixing some simple things.

So, don't ask what you can do: play with the code, find some simple feature that doesn't work and try to fix it. You're likely to get a much better response from developers if you can show you're willing to stick some effort in.