AMD Catalyst 10.4 For Linux Officially Released

[Kano]

what does

glxinfo|grep OpenGL

show you?

[mugginz]

yes.

but there are more problems...

the ubuntu nvidia driver .15 is very 'slow'@wine or mybe the 8600 is slow

starcraft2 is a pain!,,,

on my card 4670 starcraft2 runs very fast but the menu have corruptions graphic bugs..

but yes.,. at the start menu nvidia8600 1-2fps vs amd4670 100+fps but graphic errors...

i think the geforce8600 @ windows do much more fps but something is wrong @the openGL/wine support of this old card.

Have you read through the page for Starcraft2 on AppDB?
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...sion&iId=19376

In particular, this post by Shaun Rutherford seems to be pretty good.

I've spent a decent chunk of time reading all the links and thought it would be nice to create a step by step guide of how to get SC2 beta to run on Linux in a playable fashion. *note - You have to compile wine from source for now to play SC2, all commands with the exception of the install of software should NOT be ran as root, use a regular user account.

1. Download the wine source files from sourceforge.net, version 1.40 and 1.41 both worked for me. ( sourceforge.net/projects/wine/files/Source/)

2. Make sure you have all the files necessary to compile source, your kernel headers, bison, patch etc. If the system kicks you an error download that file before continuing or the install/play wont work.

3. unzip the source files in a directory of your choosing, I recommend creating a wine folder in your home drive for simplicity sake. (tar -xvf )

4. Wine must first be patched using the patch from bug 21809 by Henri Verbeet. ( bugs2.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=26628) the link points you to the patch. Copy the text and put it into a text file using your favorite text editor and save it (the name of the file doesn't matter).

5. Put the patch from step 4 into your unziped wine directory (Not the directory you created called wine, one sub-directory further with all your files in it). run "patch -p1 < the name of your patch file" (without quotes). This will update the source files for wine.

6. run "./tools/make_request" from the same directory (still without quotes). I'm not entirely sure what this does but without it wine will not compile correctly.

7. run "./configure" (without quotes) this will check the system to make sure you have all the files necessary to compile wine. If your running a debian based system you can run "sudo apt-get build-deb wine" (without quotes) to install MOST of the files necessary.

In my Ubuntu desktop and Arch Linux laptop the libmpg123 file was not a recent enough version to compile with wine (you get an error after ./configure that says missing or not current enough). If you have this problem you have to download and install the latest version of libmpg123-dev from the web. Without this file SC2 will not play sound. For Ubuntu users here is the link to Lucid's libmpg123-dev file ( packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/libmpg123-dev) for everyone else you must have 1.5 or higher, anything less will not work.

8. run "make -jX" (without quotes) where X is the number of cores your processor has. This compiles the software to be installed in Linux using all processing power available from your computer.

9. Once step 8 is completed assuming you have no errors run as root "make install" (without quotes). This will install wine to your /usr/local/bin directory (or /usr/bin directory depending on your distribution)

10. Run /usr/local/bin/winecfg to create your wine directory in your home drive and configure a few settings. Firstly, change the Windows version under the applications tab to Windows 7. Secondly under the libraries tab click the drop down box and look for mmdevapi and click add. then edit mmdevapi and change to disable (I'm not sure if this next part is necessary but it's how my install works with sound). Thirdly click the Audio tab and de-check ALSA Driver and click OSS Driver instead. Apply the settings and click okay.

11. At this point you should be able to install SC2 using wine and patch SC2. A small pop up box will come up during patching, it doesn't appear to hurt anything, just click okay.

12. In order for SC2 to run smoothly you must add a registry key in wine to tell SC2 how much video memory your system has (otherwise the game runs, but it does so very poorly). run "/usr/local/bin/regedit" (without quotes) to open the wine registry. under hkey_current_user > software > Wine right click the wine folder and choose new key. Name this new key Direct3D. Right click Direct3D and choose new string value. Name the string value VideoMemorySize. Double click VideoMemorySize to open a dialog box and enter the amount of memory in mega bytes your video card has (no need to put MB at the end of the number, a 512 will do if you have a 512MB card).

That's it, your done. You should now be able to launch SC2 and play without issue. I've played a couple of games on my laptop however I'm going to stress test the system tonight by creating a fleet of carriers and see how the system holds up under strain. Will post my results afterwards.

If I missed anything please let me know so I can edit. Hope this is helpful to someone as it took me 3-4 days worth of reading and testing to figure all this out.

and further

Something I see a lot in here which I was also victim of is making sure that sound is set to emulation in winecfg > audio tab instead of hardware (there's a drop down box at the bottom of the audio tab). Without this even with mmdevapi disabled your launch of the game will take FOREVER and eventually time out. The above fixes that.

Secondly, double check that when updating your system if you installed your 3d drivers by hand and a new kernel gets installed that you re-install the 3d driver (you must do this every time the kernel changes).

With decent hardware you shouldn't have any performance problems on low settings (anything more is kinda up in the air until the open gl patch for windows).

[mugginz]

Also, Shuan also reports he's successfully used Startcraft2 with an 8400m GS which is slower than an 8600GT (He was using medium graphics setting)

[bolzerrr]

there is no xvba support with this release? when i build the .deb?s it was missing..

[DivineGrace]

there is no xvba support with this release? when i build the .deb?s it was missing..

That is what I initially thought, but it does work. See my latest post in the XvBA thread on this forum.
I think that libamdxvba1 is now integrated into fglrx-kernel-src in Ubuntu 10.04, and possibly fglrx-glx or fglrx-driver in Debian Squeeze.

[bolzerrr]

hm i just tried the vaapi in xbmc- always crashes on my 4200, fglrx 10.4 lucid 64, latest libva1,xvba from splitted desktop..

anyone got this running?

[bwat47]

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.

KDE is REALLY slow for me with both fglrx and the oss radeon drivers(mobility 2600 and 4870 tested). Kwin compositing is really unresponsive, opening the kde menu has like a 3 second delay before it renders, its awful. I havent used kde with nvidia so I cant comment on that though.

[energyman]

KDE is REALLY slow for me with both fglrx and the oss radeon drivers(mobility 2600 and 4870 tested). Kwin compositing is really unresponsive, opening the kde menu has like a 3 second delay before it renders, its awful. I havent used kde with nvidia so I cant comment on that though.

it reacts quickly here. If you are using a cool distro, you can unbreak X and then it flies. Not everything is caused by the drivers. Sometimes X change to make the life easier for Intel and everybody else suffers....

[bwat47]

it reacts quickly here. If you are using a cool distro, you can unbreak X and then it flies. Not everything is caused by the drivers. Sometimes X change to make the life easier for Intel and everybody else suffers....

I'm don't think its possible for this post to be more ambiguous.

[rohcQaH]

what he's trying to say: try to apply the backclear patches to X. That'll speed up fglrx.

It doesn't do much for the OSS drivers though, they don't hit that specific bottleneck.

In any case, neither driver should be that slow with KDE4 - it's faster for me with fglrx, and from what I read it's faster with the OSS drivers as well.