ATI IS TEH PIMP DADDY!!! (8500 & Linux)

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Omicron 9 said:
[EDIT] Nevermind! I got it from the redhat site and it did the job. Now that the driver is installed however, I can't run the config because it overwrites THE WHOLE DAMN x86config FILE!!! USB mouse isn't even a choice??? Anyone know how I cn get around THIS? [/B]
Click to expand...

Rename the XF86Config file and run the program. It'll generate a new one. You'll then just have to look for the changes (probably only "dri" and "Card" sections) and implement them in the original one. Runs fine for me. Just don't forget to load the "dri" module and the DRM extension.

However, don't try to use the "ati" driver as mentioned in some config file the prog created in the directory I ran it from. This will hang the system.

I had problems with those drivers. 2D performasnce just wasn't there, 3D worked fine. And then I had a rather nasty bug with TV overlay from a Hauppauge WinTV (BT878 chip). The overlay created nasty artifacts by drawing on random portions of the overlay all over the screen, so I switched back to the 2D only drivers. Well, I still have Windoze for games (just because you live with it doesn't mean you have to like it...).

If ATI doesn't release working drivers for Linux, there's still gonna be the Matrox Parhelia up the road; Matrox announced full Linux support.
 
got mine to work... i didn't realize i didn't have agpgart compiled as a module when i compiled my kernel... so of course it didn't work lol, couldn't do nothin with agp:P anyways yeah it works, i'm gonna find some stuff to test it on one of these days... something other than tux racer lol
 
WTF is all this Linux bashing ??? If you don't know you to work with linux just SHUT UP, it ain't a OS for kiddies that's for sure, go back to you gaming console called windows and don't get upset if you don't even know what a ls command is, just move the pointer right above the exe on windows and play games. Linux is really for experienced users, some consider it a minus, i consider it a plus, imagine all the windows FANATICS gaming nerds asking how to configure a linux system, please don't, just don't use it, that way you're all supporting a knowlogde image among linux users. I KNOW why linux is good and don't need the "it's easy on windows" mambo jambo, anyway i've got windows98 running on win4lin emulator for linux, i JUST can't play games with it, if i want to i load up WinXP, a perfect gaming OS i must add :p it even spare me buying an XboX ! Go figure they are not so distant after all, just don't write things up about something you don't know ziltch about. :lol:


Peace,
MAIA
 
They Work....

They Work....

As the post says this drivers works, after 4 hours trying to make them work i did it, i have mandrake 8.2 distro, the first problem i had was for library libpng.so.2, mandrake cames with .3, and i found out a text from mandrake saying that both libraries shouldnt be install together, well ive done it anyway and it works... i think the mandrake link is this http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?sid=1975&lang=en i guess having both libraries can make the system unstable hope not, can anyone say if the sym link also works?? libpng.so.3 -> libpng.so.2 ??? thanks . .. ¿:-

i also had problems becouse my motherboard is Msi Kt3 Ultra Aru, and im not sure if it is fully supported( Via KT333), when they got to work glxgears runs at 2500fps, and Q3A works perfect( dunno fps, i have to look), today ill try more games as UT...
If I said something wrong sorry but im not any guru of linux im just learning.. :)
My english isnt to good also hope you understand wath i said... ;)
 
Masterhead. Do you use a fresh installation of the 8.2 ? Have you updated the packages from the 8.2 official updates ? Did you install kde 3.0.1 and qt 3 ?

Thanks
 
To boldly go where dozens have gone before!

To boldly go where dozens have gone before!

WAAAY it finally seems to me that i've got a good reason to dust of that "new" €80 SUSE 8.0 package of mine, To seek out new lives and new civilisations, to boldly go where... uhm obviously dozens have goon before HOOT! .... This is probably gonna take me the better part of the weekend... knowing that i'm a complete linux newbee...
CAN't WAIT!!! :)
 
Re: How I did it...:)

Re: How I did it...:)

I am also running RedHat 7.3 with all the fixes including Kernel updates.

I was running GATOS extensions including avview for TV support. This worked fine with RedHat 7.3.

The good:

I installed the FireGL drivers and I must say they work very well with the 8500DV card. I did save my XF86Config file before I did the install and I am glad I did. Made it easy to enter my monitor information rates. I have a Nokia445PRO card so DDC is not an option. It appears the ATI driver will try DDC first and if the driver is not able to get information from the monitor it will use the table values. Anyway, my values worked fine and at 1600x1200 I was at 106.3Khz Horiz. 85hz Vert., just where I wanted to be.
I was able to run at higher resolutions, but my eyes like 1600x1200.
XINE played MPEG video's fine.
I ran glxgears and got 200 FPS. Based on the posts I wonder if the 2000 FPS were really 200?

The bad (small issues):
Gatos aaview no longer works. So I lost TV. Oh well. The theatre driver is no longer loaded. Maybe there is a way to work around this one.
I also get server crash message when I exit X. No big deal. But the drivers does not seem to exit cleanly in my setup.

My system is setup to dual boot using GRUB between WinXP and Linux. When I am programming I boot Linux. So not having the TV is ok for now. All in all, this seems to be a good driver. It also seems they had in mind the 8500 when they wrote this driver. So maybe we will see the 8500DV supported from this same group. I hope so.

Greg

PGHammer said:


Here are my steps:

Installed RH 7.3 (Valhalla).

.... deleted some text........
RH 7.3 (Valla) is now DRI DRIven!
Click to expand...


Edited:

I had time to look and I found a problem with my setup.
The main issues were DRM and AGP.
Since I had a custom kernel I removed DRM from the kernel build.
I did leave AGP support in. I also added had to "insmod" the "fglr200" driver. The one created by the install worked fine.

Running glxgears now gave me 1900FPS. This is a lot better than the 200 I was seeing.

I also tried TuxRacer and it ran nice and fast.

I also tried SpecViewer. In my case the system would lockup after running a test case. Not sure why?

From my '/var/log/XFree86.0.log'

(II) fglr200(0): [drm] created "fglr200" driver at busid "PCI:1:0:0"
(II) fglr200(0): [drm] added 8192 byte SAREA at 0xf0901000
(II) fglr200(0): [drm] mapped SAREA 0xf0901000 to 0x40024000
(II) fglr200(0): [drm] framebuffer handle = 0xd8000000
(II) fglr200(0): [drm] added 1 reserved context for kernel
(II) fglr200(0): Kernel Module Version Information:
(II) fglr200(0): Name: fglr200
(II) fglr200(0): Version: 1.2.0
(II) fglr200(0): Date: May 28 2002
(II) fglr200(0): Desc: ATI Fire GL 8700/8800 DRM kernel module
(II) fglr200(0): Kernel Module version matches driver.
(II) fglr200(0): Kernel Module Build Time Information:
(II) fglr200(0): Build-Kernel UTS_RELEASE: 2.4.18-4custom
(II) fglr200(0): Build-Kernel MODVERSIONS: yes
(II) fglr200(0): Build-Kernel __SMP__: no
(II) fglr200(0): Build-Kernel PAGE_SIZE: 0x1000
(II) fglr200(0): [agp] Mode=0x1f000207 bridge: 0x1106/0x0305
(II) fglr200(0): [agp] AGP disable mask 0x00000000
(II) fglr200(0): [agp] enable AGP protocoll: 0x1f000304
(II) fglr200(0): [agp] AGP protocoll is enabled for grafics board. (cmd=0x1f000304)
(II) fglr200(0): [DRM] register handle = 0xe1000000
(II) fglr200(0): [DRM] ringbuffer size = 0x00100000 bytes
(II) fglr200(0): [DRM] DRM buffer queue setup: nbufs = 100 bufsize = 65536
(II) fglr200(0): [DRM] texture shared area handle = 0xf50b7000
 
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Linux sucks?

Linux sucks?

Let's take a practical look at the *nix vs. M$ debate going on in here. Before I begin though, let me say that I was disappointed that ATI didn't release drivers earlier for the 8500 boards. Even now, the Xfree86 4.2 drivers only support 2d on 8500 boards in hardware (though you can still do Mesa/OpenGL calls through software emulation...)

Okay, does Linux suck? Hardly...but is it the crash free OS that Linux pundits would like to make it? Depends. On the desktop, I'd actually say no....on the server side I'd say it's alot more stable than Windows. I work tech support for an international bank, and have worked tech support for the University of Florida as well, and have a decent amount of familiarity with each. Let me tell you....as server boxes, M$ goes down more often than a 10$ hooker at a Sailor's convention. In the year that I worked at UF, we had to physically reboot our Novell and Linux servers a grand total of 5 times, and two of those were down time to install new hardware.

At the bank I work at which is a M$ shop, we routinely reboot our W2k servers about once a week. Admittedly, we have 127 servers (about 1/3rd are NT boxes), but I'd say on any one day, odds are we reboot a server.

Let me also add that the bank is seriously considering moving the web services from IIS 5 to Apache, and are also looking at replacing our remote access servers and FTP servers with linux boxes as well. I once overheard our CIO say that for every day we were down due to tech issues, we lose a million dollars. Well, when Code Red and Nimda came out, we lost two days a PIECE, on each of those.

But while Linux and other *nix'es like BSD are awesome for servers, I won't say the same for the desktop. I have Suse 7.3 that has been heavily upgraded (running 2.4.18, glibc2.2.5, xfree86 4.2, XFS journaling file systems...among others) and Linux Mandrake 8.2 and RedHat 7.2. I have to say that each of them has their little niggles when it comes to certain things. For example, my mandrake box seems to hang, but not with Suse or RedHat installed on the identical hardware (I can't figure out what it is). On my RedHat box, for some reason I lose DNS capability over PPP during web surfing, and I have to close out of my browsers, disconnect, and reconnect until it happens again....but this doesn't happen on my Mandrake or Suse boxes on identical hardware. I will also say that it takes a lot more skill to run Linux than Windows. Just trying to get a program to install in Linux can be a lesson in frustration...and I've learned that packages suck (never used .deb's though since I don't have Debian) so I've become pretty familiar with compiling from scratch (and what a joy it is to read those make files listing all of my dependencies....)

If you are simply talking about gaming, then M$ is the only game in town, but that's changing. Winex at least offers a chance for Linux users to test the waters of M$ gaming. Other apps are coming along, namely 3dmodeling tools, with Maya and Softimage (the two biggest players...yes, bigger than 3ds Max or Lightwave) having Linux versions, and Linux riding on the coattails of the creation of Sherk (having been created on Linux). Also, the Linux version of Quake3 runs faster on Linux machines than Windows machines. So to say that Linux gaming is not feasible simply isn't true.

And while DX has made great leaps and strides and is definitely a huge factor in M$'s success in gaming, the open source world has finally woken up and is producing OpenGL 2.0, which will have many of the features of DX9 (and more), but be more user friendly (it will truly be more of a higher level programming langauge....the pixel and vertex shader langauges the DX uses are still very assembly like, pushing data into registers and such).

And the bottomline for me isn't one of practicality, but it's about ideology. I simply can not stomach M$ business practices, and neither should anyone else. For God's sake, they actually used dead people's names on a "grass roots" petition for anti-open source software. And really, M$ is really just like any powerful company, they don't care about the consumer, they care about their profits. That's why Linux is different....the kernel isn't owned by anyone, it's owned by everyone. Their's no axe to grind or dollar to be stolen. Sure, companies exist to make a buck off of Linux, but they do not control the OS itself. Even Linus himself doesn't control the OS.

I have pretty much forsaken M$ simply because their business practices and ethics have crossed the line from greed to virtual slavery. I'm the kind of person that doesn't go and vote at elections, but I will vote with my dollars. Being a budding programmer, I far more value and appreciate Linux's design philosophy to M$, but then again, I'm not greedy. If you want a good job, get your MCSE, get your VB, ASP and .net programming skills polished....but that's just not for me.
 
Re: Linux sucks?

Re: Linux sucks?

Dauntless said:
Let's take a practical look at the *nix vs. M$ debate going on in here. Before I begin though, let me say that I was disappointed that ATI didn't release drivers earlier for the 8500 boards. Even now, the Xfree86 4.2 drivers only support 2d on 8500 boards in hardware (though you can still do Mesa/OpenGL calls through software emulation...)
Click to expand...

No, please no look whatsoever at that debate. It's pointless. It's a waste of time. (OK, it can be fun sometimes, but not here!)

It should be said that the present drivers in XFree86 4.2 are not really made by ATI. ATI provided hardware specs and a sample implementation of a skeleton driver to people who asked nicely and provided a background that would have enabled them to build upon that information. All information was provided under an NDA.

The folks really behind all driver progress are the DRI Project (http://dri.sourceforge.net). The current status of their Radeon drivers is a working 2D support and no time or money to work on the 3D part. Questions about 8500 drivers are answered in several ways (nothing at all, some alpha versions, ...), but the gist of it seems to be that someone with rather excellent knowledge of graphics pipelines, system programming and an understanding of the X and Mesa structures and lots of time would be needed.

So if you are interested, have a look at the whole DRI project and perhaps find some way to contribute.

Oh, and again: has someone experienced problems with TV overlay and the fglr200 driver other that "no-go"?
 
€L1T€ said:

also isnt it true that some federal and military instalations use linux because there is alot less chance of being hacked?
Click to expand...

Not true. Friend works at a military base and across the board the military and government is moving to Windows 2000 for it's computers and servers. More stable and easier to secure. Windows XP networking sucks and is not cross platform compatible. MS really screwed up on that one. Most corporations are moving to Win2k as well. Win XP simply has more features then any corporation wants for a workstation OS.

I would love to use Linux but there is one problem.......

Games!

You simply can't get the quality games for Linux that you can for Windows. Whether anyone likes it or not MS has made the computing world what it is and our love for gaming would not be what it is without windows.
 
LukaR said:

We wouldn't play Doom III without Microsoft, like it or not.
Directx 9.0 etc....
Click to expand...

LOL,

1. Caramck = Big Linux advocate, why else would they release Quake 1, 2, 3 for linux?

I'll be anything Doom III will come out for Linux, all it is, is openGL, mesa anyone???

2. You seem to imply Doom III is DX 9, Carmack won't write code for it.

heh.
 
libredr said:
Masterhead. Do you use a fresh installation of the 8.2 ? Have you updated the packages from the 8.2 official updates ? Did you install kde 3.0.1 and qt 3 ?

Thanks
Click to expand...

libredr : Yes it was a fresh installation of mandrake 8.2rc1( the final 8.2 doesnt work in my system ¿:- ) i didn't upgrade and no, i have install what cames with the distro, the only thing ive install are mozilla1.0 and libpng.so.2 becouse without this library it wouldnt work.. abyway after posting that everything work perfect i reboot and again it didn't work as it should so i format and reinstall everything,and so found the problem, my spteps where :
1 - install libpng.so.2
2 - rpm -i --force fgl200-glc22-4.2.0-1.2.0.i586.rpm
3 - cd /lib/modules/fglr200/build_mod
4 - ./make.sh
5 - cd ..
6 - ./make_install.sh
7 - insmod -f /lib/modules/2.4.18-4mdk/kernel/drivers/char/drm/fglr200.o

and after this i made a reboot, as i said it was a fresh install of mandrake as i had just format, after reboot it work fine, in glxgears i got 2300-2400 fs
hope this can help help you a bit... :)
 
Agent-O said:


LOL,

1. Caramck = Big Linux advocate, why else would they release Quake 1, 2, 3 for linux?

I'll be anything Doom III will come out for Linux, all it is, is openGL, mesa anyone???

2. You seem to imply Doom III is DX 9, Carmack won't write code for it.

heh.
Click to expand...

All ID games are written in OpenGL, not in D3D. First it increases portability, second it is more performant.
 
masterhead said:


libredr : Yes it was a fresh installation of mandrake 8.2rc1( the final 8.2 doesnt work in my system ¿:- ) i didn't upgrade and no, i have install what cames with the distro, the only thing ive install are mozilla1.0 and libpng.so.2 becouse without this library it wouldnt work.. abyway after posting that everything work perfect i reboot and again it didn't work as it should so i format and reinstall everything,and so found the problem, my spteps where :
1 - install libpng.so.2
2 - rpm -i --force fgl200-glc22-4.2.0-1.2.0.i586.rpm
3 - cd /lib/modules/fglr200/build_mod
4 - ./make.sh
5 - cd ..
6 - ./make_install.sh
7 - insmod -f /lib/modules/2.4.18-4mdk/kernel/drivers/char/drm/fglr200.o

and after this i made a reboot, as i said it was a fresh install of mandrake as i had just format, after reboot it work fine, in glxgears i got 2300-2400 fs
hope this can help help you a bit... :)
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot masterhead.
In fact I have made a fresh install of the new Cooker snapshot. You can find the isos in the usual ftp servers. It has KDE3.0.1 and no qt2.
This time, I made these drivers work !! I installed them with --nodeps : the qt2 and other libraries it asks for are not required to install the driver, they are just required for the utility with tabs and activate multiscreens.
I could play to RTCW without problem, except I can't use the maximum setting for the general texture and some glitches. I experienced some lock-ups whn changing the resolution (but I could kill X). The performance is really excellent. I just wish I could turn the anisotropic filtering on.

Now the reason why I could not make it work on my 8.2 is still unknown, but I have a supposition. I installed a 8.2 distribution with just kdebase and kdelibs 2.2.2. Then I installed the KDE3.0.1 desktop from texstar (http://www.pclinuxonline.com) with some new themes. Then I installed the drivers and experienced the problem. Maybe it is because I used gcc 3.0.4 from 8.2 to compile the drivers, and you probably used gcc 2.96 that is given by default with a fresh install of 8.2 (I had to install gcc 3.0.4 to compile mplayer). The Cooker snapshot I installed is given with gcc 3.1, which is supposed to have corrected bugs and increased the compatibility. Maybe this is the reason.

These drivers have a problem : the Xv and overlay modes do not work, you have to select another video modes with your DVD and TV players.
 
Yo-Ho!

Over at slashdot there's a short blurb about Tungsten Graphics finally having found a sponsor for development of an open source driver for the 8500!
 
Sasquach said:


no BSOD's, no crashes, no tweaking needed, no cool flying windows screensaver......etc.etc..etc....

Frankly, i think he'd become rather bored of Linux without the need to scream at his computer every 15mins because of a BSOD. :D
Click to expand...

Although I don't hate linux and have been getting a lot better at it lately, I have to disagree on the no crashes thing...

I've had Debian, Slackware 8.x(the newest one), Mandrake 8.0, and Mandrake 8.1 crash on me. I've had Mandrake 6's X install not support a supported card with the weirdest bug no matter what I did...it'd lock at 320x240 and refuse to change resolutions(yes I edited all the neccessary files, and used the stupid Mandrake tools even...but nooo, 3 tools later, and manual editing yields nothing.)

I'm actually quite proud that I got Debian to crash and lockup lol...not even doing anything really drastic, just compiling and running a simple piece of software(not the software's fault even).

So hah! Crashproof my ass! For the record, most distros do crash a lot less than win9x...but Mandrake 8.1(or was it 8.0?) had the MOST crashes of ANY os I've ever used...EVER! That thing was the worst piece of crap I'd ever used...felt like they made it easy to use and bloated it to beyond XP levels, but forgot to keep the stability part.

XP is by the way, a damned stable OS...stabler than mandrake 8.1 anyway(or was it 8.0?)
 
One more thing about my system, after installing a new mandrake and what i said in my last post everything work perfect until i restart, then nothing worked with 3d acceleration, i had to load agin the module, etc... so i put the insmod -f /lib/modules/2.4.18-4mdk/kernel/drivers/char/drm/fglr200.o
in /etc/rc.local and now when i reboot everything works without doing anything.. :)
 
I must say that I just purchased the Xig drivers from www.xig.com and I am totally amazed! If you want, go get the demo version and try them out. I am talking "all" opengl games that have binaries available absolutely fly! The quality of all Q3 based games are just as good as windows and faster. UT based games have some shader issues it appears.

Go try them out!
 
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