the ATI proprietary driver and F10

[Anne Wilson]

On Friday 09 January 2009 13:20:52 Mike Cloaked wrote:
> Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> > Try:
> > system-config-display --reconfig
> >
> > may help or it may not. Since I don't know what the proprietary
> > drivers changed. I can't tell you if its going to do anything to fix
>
> Just thought I would add my experience in here - I have a system on which I
> used a normal F10 install and got graphics totally messed up with an Intel
> 82945G graphics chipset.  Once I had been able to get to boot to runlevel 3
> I was totally unable to start x doing system-config-display --reconfig (and
> of course system-config-display is not installed by default so you have to
> install it via yum after the main install!)
>
> I also saw that in this situation system-config-display --noui --reconfig
> should work but in my case it refused to see the graphics card at all... so
> in the end I decided to go back to the start and do a clean install from
> scratch again, but this time used the "xdriver=vesa nomodeset" kernel
> option both for the install, and also for firstboot - and then once
> firstboot was complete I added these to the grub stanza so ensure that the
> vesa driver was used subsequently during boot.
>
> At present it seems like there is an awful lot of breakage in the intel
> drivers and possibly the ATI drivers - and there is nothing more
> disheartening than having a system that won't offer a graphical login even
> if you know there are serious issues with the graphics drivers. Almost
> anything else you can work around since you can get to a graphical desktop
> and keep working on other stuff whilst you fix issues via the command line
> in a terminal window.  By the way this is not specifically a Fedora problem
> - this graphics driver pain is being felt by users of other major linux
> distributions also - but it is certainly giving a bad smell to those who
> have hardware that is affected by this.
> 
I had a conversation with a kde developer about graphics problems, largely 
because I'd had the freezing problem.  I think it's relevant here to quote 
him:

The default acceleration path for most drivers right now is the outdated and 
slower XAA (Option "AccelMethod" "XAA") which is not recommended anymore, 
especially with compositing. Unfortunately, the proprietary binary blobs of 
ATI and NVidia still only support XAA 

He went on to tell me that 3D and EXA support for HD2xxx and above is expected 
later this year (2009) as they are already in an experimental branch (of free 
drivers, AIUI).

Anne
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20090109/eb37aa43/attachment-0001.sig>