Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

Anyone have luck getting the proprietary ATI driver to work on Linux with a Radeon X300 in a modern distro?

I'm running CentOS 6 on a ThinkPad T43. The open source driver works but isn't great.

I installed the fglrx driver from elrepo, but it causes weird graphics glitches and the Catalyst Control Center doesn't recognize the driver as being installed.

I tried to install the 9.3 driver from ATI but it won't install as it expects XFree86, not Xorg.

Any suggestions are much appreciated.

Thanks.

rpug wrote:Anyone have luck getting the proprietary ATI driver to work on Linux with a Radeon X300 in a modern distro?

The proprietary driver dropped X300 support ages ago. You'll have to install an antique kernel and Xorg if you want to use it. I'm pretty sure that the resulting user experience will be far inferior to the open-source driver.

Volker wrote:
The proprietary driver dropped X300 support ages ago. You'll have to install an antique kernel and Xorg if you want to use it. I'm pretty sure that the resulting user experience will be far inferior to the open-source driver.

That was my fear. Bah!

If you or anyone else has any suggestions on improving the performance of the open source driver, they'd be much appreciated.

Thanks

The proprietary driver is useful on T41,T42,T43 and T60 models.. Using Open SuSE 11.1 , everything works great, that has the last known supported kernel stream ( 2.6.27 ). Some experts have produced patches / fixes for kernel 2.6.29 / 2.6.30 but nothing after that.

On RHEL 5.7 / Centos 5.7 ( kernel 2.6.18 ) , the driver gets installed fine and works, but when you unplug or plug the power adapter it hangs up with a kernel crash ( caps lock blinking).

As far as the XFree86 or Xorg choice, 9.3 drivers have support only for Xorg 7.4 (== 1.5) , on the centos version you mention it might be 1.7 or 1.8 hence the install is failing. You can override the setting during install, but most likely the binary module will fail to get inserted.

There is a check.sh script, which you can find when the installer is extracted

sh ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run --help
Makeself version 2.1.3
1) Getting help or info about ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run :
ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run -h|--help Print this message
ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run -i|--info Print embedded info : title, default target directory, embedded script
ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run -l|--list Print the list of files in the archive
ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run -c|--check Checks integrity of the archive
ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run --extract NewDirectory Extract this package to NewDirectory only

2) Running ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run :
ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run [options] [additional arguments to embedded script] with following options (in that order)
--keep Do not erase target directory after running the embedded script
Following arguments will be passed to the embedded script:
--install Install the driver(default)
--listpkg List all the generatable packages
--buildpkg package Build "package" if generatable ("package" as returned by --listpkg)
--buildandinstallpkg package Build and Install "package" as returned by --listpkg