Fedora 7: ATi Drivers
 

Hello, I am on Fedora 7, and aside from my other problem (mplayer), whenever I play a DVD or any video in general on, lets say VLC Player, it looks to be ...trying to find the word....choppy?

its watchable 100%, but its definitely bugging me since I have a decent ATi video card and it definitely wasn't this bad at all on Windows

Let me describe it as going from HDTV back to regular TV :)

ATi Radeon X1900 XT


Again, I am on Fedora 7 and I have absolutely no idea what I am doing, any assistance on installing drivers and what not would be great :)

I have read that there isn't any drivers for ATi for Fedora 7

true? none, at all? I just need some kind of driver to spice things up a bit ;)

I think a driver is available from freshrpms. I've had the impression for some time now that livna is a dead track and their slowness in releasing packages for FC7 may bear that out. Perhaps not a bad thing; no-one is fond of conflicting repos anyway.

http://moonshine.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=32

Why not just download the driver installer from ATI's website?

Because, like I said, I am a noob and have no idea what I am doing

:scratch: its a source :confused: what do I do? call 911!!!! lol

sheesh, linux is tough to learn in the beginning

i need to :study: but in the mean time, can you tell me what to do so I can get this all done with ? this is such an inconvenience to me and I've spent way more hours than I should have trying to figure stuff out

Okay, I think I installed the driver, ehh.. I dont know how to tell, I mean everything looks the same

Maybe I need to restart completely other than doing CTRL+ALT+Backspace ?


edit: okay yup, restarted and things still look the same, call me crazy?

How did you install it? Did you make a repo out of freshrpms? The idea being that if you do so, you will get direct access to all the packages on freshrpms so that you can be downloaded and installed by simply selecting items from Add/Remove software.

http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/ind...=0&#entry10746

note: if you installed the driver incorrectly, it is strongly recommended that you reinstall it before trying again - you could run into conflicts otherwise. And if you set up repositories, I would delete the livna one altogether (the repo files will be created in /etc/yum.repos.d) because it tends to conflict with other ones.

http://moonshine.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=31

I downloaded the RPM file, not the source file.. does it make a difference? it said it installed? I can go to Applications, System Tools and click on ATi Control

but it says "Driver does not provide the FireGL X11 extensions! Panel components will operate only partially"

then it'll come to a information screen telling me about OpenGL, such as the vendor, the version and the renderer, and that is it, there is nothing more and all I can do is click Apply and OK

I don't know why Apply is there if I can't change anything :rolleyes:


edit: And I already have Freshrpm's repository installed

well, the ATI control panel simply is very minimal - it will show information but that's it.

As for that message about X11 extensions, I saw the same thing here about six months ago - it turned out the driver was not properly installed. Then again, maybe yours is. In order to find out, you need to launch a terminal and type this:

glxinfo | grep direct

If it returns "yes", then everything is fine. If you get a "no", check the xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 and verify whether it has this section

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection

If not, put it at the bottom of the file - be careful not to make any typos (or cut and paste, that's the safest).

Check whether section "device" has driver "fglrx" instead of anything else - edit if needed.

Then try the glxinfo command again after restarting X (Ctrl + alt + backspace should do it, although I recently found it didn't work for some reason - I had to log out and select some item on the log-in (I forget its name) to achieve this). If you still get a "no", then the driver is not properly installed.

btw, you shouldn't have to download those packages manually if you set up your repositories as explained on the page I included in my previous post. Just go to Add/Remove software, select a package and click on Apply.

Anyway, if you need to install that driver again, make sure to remove the botched one first (unselect from Add/remove software). You need to edit xorg.conf to use driver "vesa" instead of "fglrx" if you are going to reboot before your new driver is installed - if not, you could end up with a blank screen.

Note: did you issue this command after installing:

aticonfig --initial ? This is the one that puts "fglrx" in xorg.conf - so you have a choice: edit it manually or use the command instead. Unless, of course, fglrx is already there.

OKay

So I typed in terminal "glxinfo | grep direct" and it said No

So I went root, changed device to fglrx, and added section extensions to the xorg file

I restarted and it wouldnt go, it said somehting about not finding fglrx, and thank god that it reconfigured xorg or I would have been screwed and wouldnt be talking to you now :)

any ideas?

If it couldn't find fglrx then the driver isn't installed.

well how the hell do I get it installed? I even uninstalled and installed through the Add/Remove

I've always had the best results using the installer from the ATI site.

Google ati linux

Well, it should work using add/remove but then installing ATI drives is always somehting of a PITA.

Now, I wonder, did you install kernel-devel first?