xorg-x11 ati drivers

[Per Bjornsson]

On Fri, 2004-10-29 at 16:35, Joshua Andrews wrote:
> I have read on Gatos devel list that the radeon theater drivers are now 
> included in xorg-x11-6.8.1-x, is this true of the xorg packages for FC3?

No. The packages in FC3 are the 6.8.1 release (presumably with small
additional local fixes/integration-related changes - I haven't checked
exactly what though); the integration of the Gatos stuff was done in the
development tree after the release was made. Any further X updates for
FC3, if they happen, will in all likelihood be made from the 6.8.X
stable branch, so there probably won't be official Fedora packages
including GATOS until FC4 at the earliest.

I'm pretty interested in this so if I have time I might try to make an
unofficial package. If someone else gets around to it earlier announcing
it here would probably be welcome. I don't think that the changes are
dramatic enough that it should be all that difficult to swap out the
base tarball from the FC3 RPMs. But I haven't tried yet, so I could be
wrong... ;)

A quick word of warning, if you are inclined to do some experimentation:
Compiling X from CVS or tarballs and dumping it on top of your old
RPM-based installation is not really a good idea. I did this a few years
ago once, and it turned out that XFree86 and Red Hat had differing ideas
of what the direction of a symlink to some directory should be (I can't
remember the details but it had to do with LSB compliance IIRC). When I
later tried a distro upgrade it died miserably on me and I had to
reinstall from scratch. Using a completely separate X tree compiled from
CVS should work OK, but you need to make sure that it doesn't clobber
anything in your original install.

Cheers,
Per

-- 
Per Bjornsson <perbj at stanford.edu>
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University