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Hercules All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800 SE 128MB
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Reviews
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Views
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Date of last review
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2
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12614
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01-09-2008
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Recommended By
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Average Price
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Average Rating
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50% of reviewers
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None indicated
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2.0
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Description:
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This card is supported insofar as it does display 2D and even hardware-accelerated 3D images. However, there are a large number of significant "gotchas" that make calling the support for this card "limited" a generous gesture-- although many of these "gotchas" are due to the newness of the video chipset(s) and may be eradicated in the near future by the various projects working on the issues listed below:
1. The generic "vesa" driver must be selected for this card during the initial XFree86 configuration process to get 2D display capabilities. The "ati", "radeon", and "firegl" or "fglrx" drivers which come packaged with some commercially available distributions are for older versions of the Radeon chipset (up to the 9200) and will not work with this card. As the 2.6 kernel appears in more distributions, support for the more recent Radeon cards will hopefully be included as a precompiled module.
2. 3D hardware acceleration (OpenGL support) and some enhanced 2D features are currently only available by using the ATI binary drivers available from either http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html, or http://www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_ati.html. The user is required to know what version of XFree86 s/he is running in order to download the proper binary from either site. Both sites host the same drivers, except the one on schneider-digital packs the .rpm inside a zip file. Which brings me to the next point...
3. The binary drivers are packaged as RPMs, which means that they must be converted if you use a non-RPM distribution, or that you must install the rpm program if you don't have it. Conversion programs (some examples are "alien" for Debian, or "rpm2tgz" for Slackware) are generally easy to find or come pre-installed, and many non-RPM distros already include rpm, but this is still an extra step which may alarm or confuse new users, due to ATI's choice to limit the binary packaging to a single type.
4. "Installation" of the RPM (either converted, or direct) is difficult (the rpm must be installed with the --force switch to overwrite some XFree86 libraries), and further does not actually "install" the driver. The user must compile the kernel modules, which may require: recompiling the kernel to turn certain features (like AGPGART) off, or on, or modularize them; may require patching the drivers (for AMD processors, nforce/nforce2 chipsets, and/or installation under kernel 2.6); and certainly requires having the proper kernel source installed. This can be difficult under certain "tweaked" distros such as Morphix, where users may have to search to find the source, or SuSE, which has a tendency to update the kernel revision during a YOU update without saying (or updating the kernel-source if already installed), so that a user can have previously installed the kernel-source for the kernel they think they have, against which the ATI driver module will not compile. This is of course solveable, but extremely unpleasant and confusing to inexperienced users.
However, there are several very good HOW-TOs that will guide the user through this somewhat torturous process:
The ATI Radeon How-to at http://www.gmpf.de/english/
The ATI Radeon Linux How-to at http://www.rage3d.com/content/articles/atilinuxhowto/. The patches mentioned can be found on the Rage3D forums at http://rage3d.com/board/showthread.p...eadid=33730800.
Some tips can be found on the Waikato Linux Users Group Wiki at http://www.wlug.org.nz/RadeonNotes
and a How-to/FAQ for Gentoo users (and others) can be found at http://odin.prohosting.com/wedge01/g...adeon-faq.html
5. Transgaming has reported that there are various conflicts (unspecified to WineX users) with the "current" ATI drivers (meaning version 3.7.0), and suggest that WineX users revert to version 3.2.8 (which is not available from the ATI website, but is available from the schneider-digital site). However, the downgrade is only to "have a hope" that WineX might work as intended, rather than a "magic bullet".
Similarly, the wine-users mailing list reports that the ATI drivers do not properly implement DGA, so it is suggested that this be turned off in the Wine configuration file to avoid the "black screen of death". However, XFree86 is preparing a 4.4 version which may ameliorate or solve some or all of these problems, and of course ATI may update their drivers at any time (but no announcement that they have plans to do so has been made).
6. And last, but certainly not least, TV-in is absolutely unavailable at this time for this chipset. It is not a supported feature in the ATI Linux drivers, and ATI's website will refer you to the GATOS project at http://gatos.sourceforge.net/ on this matter. That project's released ati.2 drivers do not support "currently produced" ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder cards (support only reaches to the 8500 DV) at this time. The GATOS project is working on support for this and other currently produced cards, but have only recently received information about the Rage Theater 200 chipset from ATI. They project 6 months (from an unspecified start date, but that date is at least December 2003 or earlier) before having any possibly releaseable TV-in driver for these cards.
Once having overcome the hurdles of the driver installation, and the disappointment of missing features available in Windows, however, users will find that the card works acceptably under both 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels.
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Keywords:
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AIW Radeon 9800SE 9800 SE Hercules All-In-Wonder
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/sbin/lspci output:
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01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4148 01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4168
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Chipset:
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R350 (video); Rage Theater 200 (TV-in)
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Connection Type:
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AGP
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07-26-2006, 04:57 AM
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#1
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Registered: Apr 2004
Posts: 19
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Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 2
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Kernel (uname -r):
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2.6
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Distribution:
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Different
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[ Log in to get rid of this advertisement]
I suppose there is no more hope for the TV-in function. Or am I missing something? I see no movement at the GATOS project. I understand development is moved to Xorg/DRI who are not occupied with TV-in.
Also ATI doesn’t seem to want to support it properly. They should in the first place be open enough with the documentation so open source projects could provide the support. Or will the ATI/AMD merger bring better Linux support for ATI?
I suppose I have to buy a separate tuner if I want to record TV programs under Linux.
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01-09-2008, 05:40 AM
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#2
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Registered: Apr 2004
Posts: 19
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Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 0
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Kernel (uname -r):
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Distribution:
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Or is there still hope, after the card did enter the second half of it's lifetime.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjIwMg
(http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=955&num=1&bcsi_scan_2141D33950467292=bna4X/Hh2BgKljR3c8quaQgAAAArvMsA&bcsi_scan_filename=scan.php ,
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=960&num=1)
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