AMD Catalyst 8.01 Linux Driver

AMD has today released the 8.01 Linux Catalyst package, which contains the fglrx 8.45 driver. New in this release are updated packaging scripts and a few fixes, which many have been hopeful for in this release. Compared to our usual Linux driver articles, this one is a bit shorter due to the KDE 4.0 release event going on at the Googleplex, which we are in the process of covering.

The fixes in this release are for cursor and icon corruption, SMP suspend support on Linux 2.6.23+, and corruption on certain Radeon HD 2000 graphics cards resulting from bad pitch alignment. Most interesting, however, this release does fix the wide-screen resolution / non-VESA mode bug that was present in Catalyst 7.12 for Linux and custom mode-lines.

The Catalyst 8.01 packaging scripts for this release were pulled from Phorogit the second week of January. When it comes to the Ubuntu packaging scripts, one change present in this release is that it's no longer needed (in most cases) to specify the release number or code-name. When simply building the Debian packages with the --buildpkg Ubuntu argument it will attempt to determine the running release using LSB information. However, if you so desire, you still can manually specify the release you wish to build the fglrx driver and packages for.

Due to the holidays and new year, the ATI/AMD Catalyst 8.01 package is a bit on the boring end when it comes to any new features, but is more along the lines of being a maintenance release. If you have any problems or would like to share your thoughts on this driver, be sure to check out the Phoronix Forums where there are lively discussions taking place.

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