Ubuntu 8.10 Beta and Radeon HD 4870...

[SolidSteel144]

Is there any chance I could get video acceleration with the proprietary or open source drivers?

[oblidor]

Is there any chance I could get video acceleration with the proprietary or open source drivers?

What do you mean? X-video?

[SolidSteel144]

I just can't get any video drivers to work...

[oblidor]

I just can't get any video drivers to work...

Which drivers and how have you installed them. Other than that, why install 8.10? Get 8.04 and use it until 8.10 has been released and the first fixes have come. It works fine in 8.04 for me, with the fglrx driver.

But read this page carefully: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI

[rbmorse]

8.10 should work with the radeonhd driver in the 8.10 repository. The installer defaults to the radeon driver, which produces a black screen.

I just installed 8.10 from the liveCD. Let it run until drive activity stops, wait a bit longer, then open a text terminal (<ctrl><alt><F3>) and from there you can use nano (as sudo) to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Add the line

Driver "radeonhd"

to the device section of the xorg.conf file, save and restart X and all should be well.

[bridgman]

The open source drivers should work OK with the HD4870 as long as you get the most recent code, ie you probably have to download and build from git. I don't know how current the code is in the 8.10 packages. You won't get video acceleration with the open source drivers on HD4xxx yet but if you use the -x11 output you should get OK video playback performance.

EDIT - just saw rbmorse's post; if radeonhd in 8.10 works just use that.

[d2kx]

Ubuntu 8.10 offers RadeonHD 1.2.1 only, which does not support RV770 at all.

[SolidSteel144]

So in other words just use 8.04 for now?

[rbmorse]

Does the latest radeonhd from git support the RV770?

If so, the science project would be to install 8.04, install git and build the latest radeonhd into 8.04, then do a global search and replace of the word "hardy" with "intrepid" in the file /etc/apt/sources.list then open a terminal and:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

In theory that should give you 8.10 (Beta) plus all updates.

Do you feel lucky?

[grantek]

If so, the science project would be to install 8.04, install git and build the latest radeonhd into 8.04, then...

You could also just install 8.10 and live with vesa/text mode until you can get git radeonhd compiled. I've got a RV770 but haven't tried doing anything with Ubuntu 8.10/XServer 1.5, could be interesting though