Hello, I hope you can help me. I am trying to find a Linux distro that supports HD6850 out of the box. I have tried Linux Mint 11 x64 and Mageia 1 x64, but neither could boot into the desktop successfully due to incompatible gfx driver. My computer is a HP Pavilion Elite HPE-515sc and it has a Radeon HD6850 gfx card.

I have been trying to search online for information on HD6850 and Linux, but so far all I have found are threads from about 8 months ago which state that the card is so new that its support is lacking. I was hoping that in these 8 months there might have been development in this case and this card might be supported by the most recent kernel or something. I'd like to know, if possible, which distro is likely to support my graphics card, before I download it, because I am on mobile broadband so it takes a fair amount of time to download a distro.

I hope I posted this in the right section and included every bit of info needed.

You could give Debian a shot (www.debian.org), I've had really good luck with it supporting various types of hardware out of the box. There's a single proprietary driver for most modern ATI cards. Here's some information on how to install the proprietary ATI drivers in Linux Mint if you want to stay with that.

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i personally have different experience with debian and find due to older kernels used, it has issues with new hardware; this obviouely wouldnt be quite the case with testing and sid. either way give it a shot and u might get lucky. if your willing to learn, i'd recomend arch since is packages are very new, and the newer kernel might help you out. i have never used arch though so it my information is wrong, someone feel free to correct me.

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This might help.

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...6850-(with-KMS)

It looks pretty complicated.

As regards Debian, it tends to value stability over bleeding-edge. It's not likely be the first on the street with drivers for new hardware.

Fedora and Ubuntu try very hard to be bleeding edge. Of the leading distros, they are likely your best candidates.

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Anyway you could also use newer kernels on Debian Squeeze from the backports that maybe support your hardware.

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Thank you, each of you, for trying to help. It says a lot about the community here.

I tried the livecd of the most recent Ubuntu release (11.04) but the livecd would not load the desktop.

I have not tried Fedora, because my understanding is that Fedora doesn't like ATI cards to begin with.

How long can one expect for it to take, usually, for new video cards to be supported by Linux?

Try Opensuse live and see.

It looks as it Fedora would work:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showth...ghlight=HD6850

I've tried OpenSuse, Fedora, and Mageia, including alpha versions of the first two, and none of them worked. I removed the gfx card that came with my PC and am using integrated now (Core i5's integrated) and it is working great. I'm going to buy an nVidia card at some point, since they are apparently better supported on Linux.

Thank you all for your replies and suggestions; I was really amazed by how many people took the time to try and help.