Rage LT PRO, Bt829 capture

[tns1]

What is the likelihood I can find a linux driver that will support all the features of this old chipset? I can boot Knoppix 3.2 so I know the basic driver is out there, and I see some apps I'd like to use that do web cam stuff, but it is the video capture feature of the driver I am interested in.

ATI site does not have linux drivers that old.

[JonSvenJonsson]

check gatos.sf.net and if it says your chipset is supported, either try to compile xorg-cvs for yourself, or get an distribution which has at least xorg-6.8.1 (eg ubuntu hoary or FC3 or Suse9.2) and use the binary snapshots from dri.sf.net

cheers Jon

[JonSvenJonsson]

Ok here comes an quick howto on adding latest xorg-cvs ati-drivers to your distributions x-package (debian/ubuntu specific, but should work for other distros similiar). Note i mainly do this to a) check out r300 progress and b) maintain my distributions package-managment.

1) Get Ubuntu for your architecture
http://releases.ubuntu.com/warty/ (or install debian sid)

2) After you installed it and set it up (X running) change your /etc/apt/sources.list so that it contains the following line:

deb-src ftp://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary main restricted universe

Do this also if you have debian-sid, it is save to do so, as we only add an source repository.

3) do an

apt-get update

4) get the build-deps for xorg

 apt-get build xserver-xorg

If it say something about "not possible" (mainly on debian-sid, it want an newer xrender) then repeat the above step, but get the build-dep for the missing dependency. This gets ubuntus source of the missing.

5) get the source-code

apt-get source xserver-xorg

if you had previous an missing dependency you should also get the source of it

6) change to the newly unpacked directory. If you needed to get libxrender-dev and friends, first change to them, issue the following command

dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

watch it compile and install the new packages by changing to the toplevel dir and doing an

 dpkg -i package-name.deb

7) now comes the somewhat tricky part: do an cvs-checkout of these two directory from xorg into a fresh directory: xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/drivers/i2c and xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/drivers/ati and also checkout the Imakefile xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/drivers/Imakefile

cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/xorg co xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/drivers/i2c

cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/xorg co xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/drivers/ati

cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/xorg co xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/drivers/Imakefile

You could repeat this step for other parts of xorg that are of interest for you.

Now change to the xorg-build directory (its called xorg-6.8.1) and do an

dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

. Watch the output, it first unpacks the source, then applies the patches and the does an lndir (this is the one where many lines with ../../../somename scroll over your screen). After it finished the lndir command hit strg+c to stop the build-process. Now change to the sublevel directory called build-tree. You should see two directory one called xc and one called xc-xserver-xorg-dbg. do an

rm -fr xc-xserver-xorg-dbg

. then change into the xc directory. Now do an

cp -a /whereyoustoredcvscheckout/xc/* .

to copy the cvs checkout into ubuntus build-tree. now change back into the toplevel directory xorg-6.8.1.

Now you are ready to build xorg, this time for real. Do an

IGNORE_MANIFEST_CHANGES=1 dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -nc

.
Notice the differences between the two build-commands ? The first one is because the new ati drivers adds new files and this would stop the packaging, with the Ignore directive we skip the file check. The second option "-nc" says that the build-command should NOT clean the source tree but worked with our changed source-tree.

Get a book, read and wait for the compile to finish.

8) after the compile finished you should have many *.deb files. You could install them all, but this would probably be waste of disk-space, so do the following:
create a dir called dbg. do an

 mv *dbg*.deb dbg

. This moves the debug-libs into its own directory. Then do an

dpkg -i *.deb

to install the new packages.

Have fun

Benefits of this approach:
1) you remain distributions package-sanity
Contras:
2) somewhat difficult