AMD's R300 Gallium3D Driver Is Looking Good For 2011

[Panix]

One main complaint is it seems you have to create an xorg.conf file which was supposedly redundant or not required anymore. But, for OSS radeon cards, at least older ones, you need to.

Here's a Gentoo user having trouble with his older card and he created the xorg.conf file:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-857308.html

At least, he's having better luck with his card. I'm using Debian but it's not the first time I've had trouble with my card (Radeon 9000). Even after googling, for recent info and articles/posts, I still don't know what the solution is. I'm not sure what should be in xorg.conf if anything and there's no indication of what is required for the support to be enabled. So, no one cares about having this optimized so unless you're a computer hacker, you might as run Windows with this older hardware.

[Dard]

Ubuntu? Yes, that's a completely different story (but I think they wrote some Gnome notification thing...or something : ).

I see plenty of things where Ubuntu really should invest money in if they can.
I just meant that I don't see the free AMD graphics drivers as a priority for companies like Ubuntu or Redhat.
Now, network drivers, virtualization, working environments and so on, yes, this is what I would Ubuntu expect to invest more in.

Which is why I don't complain about distributors. I just complain about a regrettably bad situation, which is, alas, an understandable situation.

[yotambien]

I see plenty of things where Ubuntu really should invest money in if they can.
I just meant that I don't see the free AMD graphics drivers as a priority for companies like Ubuntu or Redhat.
Now, network drivers, virtualization, working environments and so on, yes, this is what I would Ubuntu expect to invest more in.

Which is why I don't complain about distributors. I just complain about a regrettably bad situation, which is, alas, an understandable situation.

Right, I myself only wanted to point out that mentioning Ubuntu and Redhat in the same sentence when talking about upstream development (including graphics drivers) is, at the very least, totally unfair towards Redhat.

[Mr James]

I see plenty of things where Ubuntu really should invest money in if they can.
I just meant that I don't see the free AMD graphics drivers as a priority for companies like Ubuntu or Redhat.
Now, network drivers, virtualization, working environments and so on, yes, this is what I would Ubuntu expect to invest more in.

Which is why I don't complain about distributors. I just complain about a regrettably bad situation, which is, alas, an understandable situation.

I wonder what Ubuntu employees spend thier time working on. Oh that's right, they did come up with a font and a Unity interface nobody (as far as I read) seems to like.

[devius]

I wonder what Ubuntu employees spend thier time working on. Oh that's right, they did come up with a font and a Unity interface nobody (as far as I read) seems to like.

And the software center/store or whatever it's called nowadays. Oh, and you can read pretty far

[Mr James]

And the software center/store or whatever it's called nowadays. Oh, and you can read pretty far

New guys (to Linux) seem to like it at ubuntuforums.org

That's about it. In every other forum including but not limited too the Debian forums, Gentoo forums, Arch forums, Phoronix and so on do not like the unity thing, at least on a desktop.

At least it is easy to change.

[pingufunkybeat]

ATI's support for R200/R250 and R300 still sucks horribly.

What good is this OSS if the user has to tweak everything and have to go through pages and pages via Google to get an ancient card working (which would work fine in Windows)?

OSS, yeah, sure...

Nice of ATI to thumb its nose in the direction of Linux but claim otherwise with a bunch of sheep nodding along the way!

Wait, you have an r300 card now?

Or are you just in a trolling mood again?

[bwat47]

I wonder what Ubuntu employees spend thier time working on. Oh that's right, they did come up with a font and a Unity interface nobody (as far as I read) seems to like.

I'm not sure where you came up with that statistic, from what I have seen the reception of unity has been quite fine.

[elanthis]

I read a little in the specifications, and there's no way I would ever start working on the driver unless I get one or two years of education in hardware/software co-design and a full time job. It's just too complex to work on one or two hours after work.

Parts of it, sure. Helping architect the entire driver, absolutely. Fixing a bug here or there, not so much. Helping with some of the simpler but very important aspects of the driver software, like the GLSL compiler (which is very cleanly written and well designed) is also not something that requires a tremendous amount of time or any exceptional knowledge of hardware.

Hell, just help triage bugs in the freedesktop or your distribution's bugzilla, to help the more skilled developers focus time on the actual bugs.

You can always help. Even if you have no programming experience at all.

[Panix]

I was going to give up but decided to look via Synaptic at possible packages that relate to video. So, I upgraded linux firmware packages and the radeon driver version to name two. Fortunately, when I retried various tests including tuxracer and Google Earth, they worked! I had a problem with Google Earth on this machine (with Radeon 9000 card, M9, R250), too! So, I am not sure which package upgrade helped or if that was the solution, but it's my interpretation that something upgraded 'fixed' "something" so now these programs work. Glxgears worked previously but tuxracer would crash to a black screen and Google Earth's logo would display and then disappear.

They now work albeit slow but the main thing is these two packages work now. I interpret the 'solution' of the packages being upgraded since I cannot trace much different being changed except for that. It's my inexperience and lack of knowledge, I admit, but I didn't find this 'solution' on google. I read a few claims of what packages were needed but I thought I had nothing to lose so looked up packages that might relate to video and just upgraded them if there was a new version available.

This is Debian Testing, kernel 2.6.32-5. Anyway, 'glad that these programs work. I'm not complaining about the slow speed as I expect it to be slow as this is on older hardware but I thought at least I should not have a crash. It's frustrating when you are confused and not sure what's wrong - at least, if there is some feedback or some way to troubleshoot but I really had no idea of what was wrong.