Asus AMD+RadeonHD3200+Fedora9+Noob

[jadube]

My system info is below and I'm posting to ask for advice on how to updrade video drivers with Fedora9. I have a multiboot system - and had previously installed fglrx on Ubuntu. But I'm now using Fedora and have not found a 'how to' for Fedora driver install. I did try setting the video card option (via a control panel) to use "ATI Radeon" - which produced a black (boot) screen and led to a RescueCD operation to restore x11.conf to use "vesa" driver. I have a widescreen monitor that goes up to 1600 - but currently limited to 1440.

Thanks for any advice.

[janl]

With Fedora 9, you'll probably want to install the RadeonHD driver and try using that. The proprietary fglrx driver does not currently work on Fedora 9 unless you downgrade the XServer to the version used by Fedora 8. Fedora 9 uses a near-final beta version of XServer which AMD/ATI does not yet support in the "official" driver.

If you still want to try using the fglrx driver on Fedora 9 you can take a look here.

[jadube]

Thanks. I'll install/try the RadeonHD driver - but would like to be prepared to recover if there is a problem. My only recovery experience so far was editing one line in xorg.conf - which was pretty simple. I'm not sure what happens with a driver install, but assume it does more than change one line in a text file. Any suggestion or URL where I can read about 'how to' recover/revert from a 'bad' video driver upgrade?

[janl]

To install the driver in Fedora you can simply do from the command line

su -
yum --enablerepo=updates-testing install xorg-x11-drv-radeonhd

Then you can simply edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to use "radeonhd" as the driver, as you tried to do before with changing it to use radeon.


Just as a point, I'm using the RadeonHD driver myself. Have 2 3870s in my system (though only 1 works under Linux currently). It works great. The only thing is that the driver currently does not support 3D acceleration for anything newer than the R500 series, and that was just added recently and is not present in the Fedora packages yet.

[PGHammer]

Silly-sounding Question (Fedora 9 vs. openSuSE 11)

To install the driver in Fedora you can simply do from the command line

su -
yum --enablerepo=updates-testing install xorg-x11-drv-radeonhd

Then you can simply edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to use "radeonhd" as the driver, as you tried to do before with changing it to use radeon.


Just as a point, I'm using the RadeonHD driver myself. Have 2 3870s in my system (though only 1 works under Linux currently). It works great. The only thing is that the driver currently does not support 3D acceleration for anything newer than the R500 series, and that was just added recently and is not present in the Fedora packages yet.

I have a seemingly-silly-sounding question:

I am running openSuSE 11.0 RC1 (unless a real nasty showstopper bug comes along, I'd be surprised to see another RC; however, its inability to coexist with Vista seems like just such a bug; for that reason the two are on different hard drives - they don't even share a bootloader), but with the closed-source (Catalyst 8.5) driver (custom-built by yours truly against the RC1 kernel, but using the 10.3 switch in the installer/builder). If I'm not mistaken, both Fedora 9 and openSuSE are using the late 7.3 series X.org core (which includes the open-source radeonhd, ati, and radeon servers); then I shouldn't have 3D (which I certainly do). You may be able to use FC9's kernel-source to build the closed-source driver/RPM; however, you may have to specify an *FC8* target via the CLI switches (because your distribution isn't officially-official, target the last officially-official release instead; I used the 11.0 RC1 sources, but used the CLI switches for 10.3). It's sneaky, underhanded, and likely fattening; however, it works. In fact, it's the only way I've been able to have drm *and* DRI working with this card (ATI X1650 PRO AGP).