r300/500 rant

[amphigory]

What is really remarkable is how stable the development tree has been considering the huge number of commits happening. I'm running Debian unstable with kernel 2.6.33-rc8, DRM, Mesa, and xf86-video-ati from built from source on a 1st gen Macbook Pro (RV530/X1600). I did a git pull this morning and, yet again, everything just works. I have yet to find a native Linux app that does not work with the OSS driver stack and I don't remember the last time I had X crash. I've had more crashes and other anomalies occur with the NVIDIA proprietary driver than I have with ATI OSS.

For someone that does not want to put any effort into their computer I'd recommend they buy a Mac and run OS X. It's hard to feel any sympathy for anyone that bitches about a software product that does not cost them a dime but is unwilling to put any work into fixing their problems.

[Zhick]

right..

upgrading isn't really an option, perhaps you could've used your pea brain to read my initial post correctly to realize that. you would've also read that my gpu is just at the upper edge of support drop - in english, it means im just handful of revisions away from official support, which makes it all the more frustating - support for my chip was dropped along ones that were considerably older.

i'm not sure what you were trying to say with 'running a distro capable of catalyst' ... maybe you should read up on linux a bit.

but anyway, thanks for providing me with a reason to be angry again .. idiot.

Wow... I never understood why people would start insulting others who are just trying to help them. Way to go to make yourself look like a total asshole.
The world doesn't revolve around you, there might very well be other people reading this thread for which DanL's suggestion is an option.
And regarding supported distros (no idea why I'm trying to help you): Debian Lenny or Ubuntu 8.04 are probably your best candidates. If you'd like a more up-to-date system there's also Gentoo, who still allows installing X.org 1.5, that's what my setup looks like right now. But apparently they're slowly starting to remove it from portage as well. I guess you could keep the necessary ebuilds in a local overlay though if they drop it before radeon/mesa does everything you want it to (that's what I'm planing to do).

[DanL]

perhaps you could've used your pea brain to read my initial post correctly to realize that.

Nah, waste of time.

... maybe you should read up on linux a bit.

Why? I have a much better grasp of your situation than you do. I would tell you to read up more, but your reading comprehension seems to be lacking.

but anyway, thanks for providing me with a reason to be angry again .. idiot.

Way to shoot the messenger. At any rate, you're welcome (for my time/attention).

[HokTar]

Well, the "capable of running catalyst 9.3" meant that you should use a distro which has appropriate xorg, kernel, etc. versions for that particular driver. And you will have some more support for your card and you can wait until the oss beats fglrx seriously in every way.

By the way, I've been using the oss driver since about last June on my rv730, because I couldn't watch a single movie otherwise.

[pedepy]

Reality and bottom line: Either upgrade your GPU, run a distro capable of using Catalyst 9-3, or wait patiently for the r300g driver if neither one of those options are feasible. Ranting won't help in this case. I suggest therapy or using a punching bag as more effective alternatives.

right..

upgrading isn't really an option, perhaps you could've used your pea brain to read my initial post correctly to realize that. you would've also read that my gpu is just at the upper edge of support drop - in english, it means im just handful of revisions away from official support, which makes it all the more frustating - support for my chip was dropped along ones that were considerably older.

i'm not sure what you were trying to say with 'running a distro capable of catalyst' ... maybe you should read up on linux a bit.

but anyway, thanks for providing me with a reason to be angry again .. idiot.

[DanL]

Reality and bottom line: Either upgrade your GPU, run a distro capable of using Catalyst 9-3, or wait patiently for the r300g driver if neither one of those options are feasible. Ranting won't help in this case. I suggest therapy or using a punching bag as more effective alternatives.

[DanL]

You're only looking at it from your point of view and not ATI's. They're not duplicating effort. A lot of fglrx is code from the Windows Catalyst driver and some of ATI's customers need that driver.

[pedepy]

the whole point of my rant was that i don't understand that *any* development time is spent on bringing open source support to anything that currently is still undet the scope of fglrx; either you guys drop fglrx altogheter or you quit duplicating efforts and get all of your open source developers to work on hardware which has been "deprecated".

[pingufunkybeat]

Therefore, a closed-source driver is not "replacing half of the linux ecosystem" but just supplying the necessary functionality to drive the hardware in question to a well defined, small subset of the system you are using.

It's replacing the bottom half of X, all of Mesa and the parts of the kernel which deal with memory management and the GPU (TTM/GEM, KMS, etc.)

So instead of running an open-source X server, and open-source OpenGL implementation and an open-source in-kernel memory manager, you are running a big fat blob.

Surely you see why many of us feel that this is very different from running Doom3 with user privileges on a Free OS?

[pingufunkybeat]

Don't get me wrong, I am very much an advocat of open source, but the mere existence closed source software doesn't kill puppies

I completely agree with you, and I feel the same way when it comes to running a specialised closed-source application on a Free OS.

But when the closed source software allocates memory, manages hardware, reprograms the clocks and directly affects the ability of each and every Linux program to draw a pixel, then it's very close to killing puppies

And for this reason I appreciate the open source efforts. True, dynamic powersaving (the static one has been available forever!) is taking its time, but this is also due to having to wait for the KMS infrastructure to mature. It's unfortunate, but if you're willing to get your hands dirty a bit and build from source, you'll be good to go.