AMD Catalyst 10.4 For Linux Officially Released

[mugginz]

my frend and my person fails to install NVIDIA 195.36.24 because this driver can not uninstall NVIDIA 195.36.15 and this brokes the system only rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf helps out...

He will find that the repo based driver which is only a few clicks to install will work pretty well. It's what I'm using with a 9800GT and an 8400GS at the moment as is really quite robust.

[mugginz]

in the end... today we try 5h install the newest nvidia driver over a .15 version...

yes this broke all nvidia closed source drivers..

in the end i rm xorg.conf and now we use vesa? or nouveau

Has he tried the bundled driver or did he go straight to the latest one from the site?

If self installing the Web based driver he'll have to blacklist modules but even that will work.

Make a file called something like

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklistnvidia.conf

and throw this into it

blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveau
blacklist nvidia-173
blacklist nvidia-96

[Kano]

Basically running ati/nvidia run installers is a very bad idea on lucid. It is very likely that it will break during update or when jockey wants to install something. The fglrx package for example tries to uninstall the files which the ati-installer copied onto the system, but fails because of the install has already been modified that you need an override value to "really" execute the uninstaller. the nvidia-installer has got an --uninstall option too but most likely it damages the system too. lucid has got too clever driver switching which uses a subdir for each driver and change ld search path while installing a binary driver. you could even install nvidia+fglrx the same time and switch with

sudo update-alternates --config gl_conf
sudo ldconfig
sudo update-initramfs -u

and adjusted /etc/X11/xorg.conf - for oss just delete the file. Because only the ati installer provides a switch to build lucid packages i did not update my nvidia script. Its too hard to integrate that cleanly in a non packaged way. Best reinstall if you tried something like that for nvidia and use an nvidia ppa for driver updates. my script tries to fix the problems when the ati-installer was used in the wrong way - the "correct" way was impossible anyway without tricks as ati is in 99% of all cases too stupid to supply correct packageing that suits for the driver - which they only need to fetch from fglrx-packageing.git in a timely manner.

[pingufunkybeat]

This I find very strange. nVidia has legendary support for both Compiz and Kwin.

Compiz yeah, but the "legendary support" for KWin is hardly something to be proud of.

How long did it take nVidia to get decent performance with KDE4? A year? When all other drivers were just fine?

For those of us stuck with older nVidia cards, it is still buggy, and will remain like that forever.

[Kano]

Well you should not overrate that, as soon as agp boards are dead you can easyly replace pci-e cards. I would suggest to get rid of agp systems as soon as possible - the only "upgrade" is to use ati cards for agp and those are the most problematic ones. 2nd hand nv agp cards are often too expensive.

[mugginz]

Compiz yeah, but the "legendary support" for KWin is hardly something to be proud of.

Yes, there was a period where for some cards with a few versions of the driver KDE 4 was far from blazingly fast.

How long did it take nVidia to get decent performance with KDE4? A year? When all other drivers were just fine?

When ALL other drivers were just fine. Hmmmm. Doesn't fit my recolection.

For those of us stuck with older nVidia cards, it is still buggy, and will remain like that forever.

Which cards?

My current main desktop has had 7600, 8600, 9800 cards running with Kubuntu. (I've only just swapped over to Ubuntu for 10.04)

I've run Kubuntu since about 2006. I didn't experience the particular slow downs that were reported by others but given the amount of reports of it it's certainly fair to assume it was happening. Having said that, are you saying the ATI was always better? You might be able to find corner cases where fglrx was better then nVidia blob but not that many.

For the most part nVidia has provided the best experience for Compiz and Kwin. Are you saying this isn't the case, and that fglrx has always been the better performing (in terms of reliability and functionality) option? If you are then we'll have to agree to disagree on that.

The last time I fired up my lagacy test bench to get an idea of memory usage for 10.04 beta I didn't find any issues. It's a celeron 1.2GHz with 512M and nVidia TNT 2. That was with recent drivers though (71.86.13 ). I've just fired it up again and am doing an install of Kubuntu 8.10 and will report back with what I find.

[Kano]

Then use Kanotix there you can try that driver even in live mode - same for fglrx, just add 3 as option to boot into text mode first.

[mugginz]

Then use Kanotix there you can try that driver even in live mode - same for fglrx, just add 3 as option to boot into text mode first.

@Qaridarium, given that people seem to be happy with Kano's scriptage I'd strongly consider that for those without the know how to manually install the blob. Either that or stick with the pre-packaged driver unless there's a compelling reason to do something different.

[fluxion]

Mostly what surprised me was when you said;



When you need software that wont work well with an ATI card, whether or not you have xrandr support can be mute point. I consider software compatibility as more important but as you rightly raise, different people have different priories.



Well given that nVidia provide a public API to a vast list of configuration settings it seems quite a bit more flexable. But if you cant code then that of course is of no use, but...




Thankfully for us nVidia users Willem van Engen has come to our rescue with a utility called Disper that provides a fair degree of control via the command line. Is that the one you're speaking of?

http://willem.engen.nl/projects/disper/

I've only tested it on Kubuntu 10.04 with the bundled blob so haven't done tonnes of testage to test every aspect of it but it does seem fairly full featured.

yup, Disper was the tool...and something like that is what you end up needing to hotkey monitor enable/disable. i tried it not too long ago...didnt quite work for me but looking at the source code i guess i might've been able to hack something together...it does at least make it clear that monitor disable/enable is at least exposed to userspace in SOME fashion

xrandr support for me seems like core functionality when it comes to truly supporting linux, but it is be a bit hypocritical of me to elevate my needs above others...i only mean to say that there are some who would disagree about nvidia having better linux support.

That opinion was fairly reasonable to hold but thankfully for the Linux comunity that's starting to change. I actually like ATI's hardware and want to buy one of their cards myself and cant wait for fglrx to reach full maturity which by all accounts is probably not that far off.

i heard a lot of scary stories about ati..still do....but the switch (bought a 5770 about a month ago) has been far less painful than i expected. i don't do a whole like of 3d stuff so with proper xrandr support even my main+tv <-> main+secondary setup was largely plug-n-play.

[mugginz]

yup, Disper was the tool...and something like that is what you end up needing to hotkey monitor enable/disable. i tried it not too long ago...didnt quite work for me but looking at the source code i guess i might've been able to hack something together...it does at least make it clear that monitor disable/enable is at least exposed to userspace in SOME fashion

I found it worked well for both enabling a second screen in clone mode (for times where you'd want to connect your lappy to a projector) as well as manipulating Twinview for spanning as well.

xrandr support for me seems like core functionality when it comes to truly supporting linux, but it is be a bit hypocritical of me to elevate my needs above others...i only mean to say that there are some who would disagree about nvidia having better linux support.

I do agree that there are corner cases where ATI makes more sense. I'd really like to see xrandr 1.3 directly supported by nVidia but have found the other options (either the GUI or command-line) to fulfull the required functionality so it hasn't been an impediment for nVidia adoption for myself personnaly.

It certainly was a lot more cut and dry 6 months ago where the fglrx nightmares seemed more prevalent, but now at least it looks like salvation is on the horizon.

i heard a lot of scary stories about ati..still do....but the switch (bought a 5770 about a month ago) has been far less painful than i expected. i don't do a whole like of 3d stuff so with proper xrandr support even my main+tv <-> main+secondary setup was largely plug-n-play.

Good to hear. I don't mean to sound like an nVidia fanboi and hope I don't. I want Linux to succeed. For it to succeed it needs to properly support all of the widely used hardware out there. That includes Intel, nVidia and ATI. If we have a situation were you have people saying "Linux works great..... unless you have ATI gfx cards" it hurts adoption. At the same time it also hurts adoption when people are promised things that can't be delivered so I guess that's why I'm such a stickler for people to be clear about what others can expect with an ATI card. If it's mostly great, but not so good in a couple of cases, I don't see anything wrong with people being open about that. It prevents people buying hardware that wont do what they want which will only burn them and leave them with a bad taste in their mount regarding Linux.

You yourself have been clear about your findings so the above isn't really directed at you but is more to relay my perspective and motivations on the matter.