the ATI proprietary driver and F10

[Dave Stevens]

I recently installed a new HD and used the occasion to upgrade from F7 to F10 
(both 64 bit). Things worked and I was curious about the difference in 
graphics performance between the open driver and the ATI driver. So I 
downloaded the ATI driver, ran the install and rebooted. This caused me to 
now boot partway through in the usual way and then to get a black screen with 
no apparent responses to mouse or keyboard.

So I booted off the install medium and went into rescue mode with the HD 
mounted under /mnt/sysimage. I then discovered that there isn't apparently 
any xorg.conf. I was trying to reconfigure to get back to a working system. I 
went into a Phoronix forum and asked how, with this reply:

---- reply ---------------


The proprietary driver does not support Fedora in general, and specifically 
does not work on F10 today. I believe one user was able to get it working but 
please stick with the open drivers for F10.

There isn't much you can do about 3D performance immediately but if you enable 
EXA acceleration you should get pretty decent 2D performance. If you are 
willing to give up kernel modesetting you could probably also pick up the 
latest radeon release and get tear-free video playback as well, although I 
haven't tried the latest release on F10.

AFAIK the standard F10 install does not have an xorg.conf file.

------- end of reply ----------------

Mr. Bridgeman (the respondent)  is I think a staff engineer at ATI who works 
on the process of disclosure of ATI card internals for free software 
programmers, so it seems his reply is likely to be authoritative. Fine. But 
how do I drop back to my previous working config?

Dave

-- 
Canada must refuse to be entangled in any more wars fought to make the world 
safe for capitalism.

-- The Regina Manifesto, 1933