Ati driver
 

How can i install Ati radeon driver on slackware 8.1?

Just so has it that a guy on my floor here at school has a radeon 7500. I got him all set up with slackware and KDE to start out with, but we found very limited support for the lower radeon cards. ATI doesn't provide the linux drivers for the older cards as it seems, and very minimal support for any of their others. And the ones provided with slack aren't top of the line obviously. So far we havn't found a place to get any decent ones. On the other hand, Nvidia seems to be well ahead of the game in supporting linux open source drivers for almost all of their products. woohoo, *pets his geforce*.. but back to the actual question... you may want to have a look here to see what these will do for you. Supposedly these work across the board with all ATI powered boards. Also while crawling around on ATI's page I found
this which explains their involvement in linux and driver development and all this bullshit, but there aren't many drivers on that page at all. In fact, most products if you go to their product page and drivers, will say that ATI doesn't develope their drivers and to check with XFree86. Which is why I am a bit confused as to where they are hiding them :D and/or why they aren't developing them themselfs.

I posted something on it here :
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=41293

Re: Ati driver
 

Here's how I manually install them on source based distros,
I use rpm2targz to reformat the .rpm pkg, then extract with
cd /<some-tmp-dir> ...let's assume ~/
tar xzf <pkg-name>.tar.gz
then put the modules where they belong
cp -Rf fglrx/lib/modules/fglrx /lib/modules
then go build and install a custom kernel module using the supplied scripts.
cd /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod
sh make.sh
cd ../
sh make_install.sh

then I copy ~/fglrx/usr/X11R6/bin/fglrxconfig, fgl_glxgears and fglrxinfo into /usr/X11R6/bin

Follow the same procedure with the content of ~/fglrx/usr/X11R6/lib, but I backup my existing /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1.2 to DRI-libGL.so.1.2 before copying over. The rest in ~/fglrx/usr/X11R6/lib/modules won't overwrite existing files.

Then #lsmod to see what modules are loaded
#modprobe -r radeon if it's loaded and
#modprobe fglrx if required,
Run #fglrxconfig or adapt your own XF86Config-4 file,
Then startx.

...well, you gotta have at least a radeon 8500 to use Ati's driver.

i tried but....
 

Hello UnTamed..

i tried to install them but it failed and make.sh gave this error message..

ATI module generator V 2.0
==========================
probing for VMA API version...
cleaning...
patching 'highmem.h'...
patching 'drmP.h'...
patching file drmP.h
Hunk #1 succeeded at 337 (offset 82 lines).
compiling 'agpgart_be.c'...
compiling 'agp3.c'...
compiling 'i7505-agp.c'...
compiling 'firegl_public.c'...
firegl_public.c:694: redefinition of `__cmpxchg'
patch/drivers/char/drm/drmP.h:276: `__cmpxchg' previously defined here
compiling failed - object file was not generated


So i can not install the driver..

note : My video card is Radeon9700Pro

You may need a kernel compiled for i586 or higher.
cmpxchg [...compare & exchange] is a kernel parameter that gets set automatically when you set optimisation for i586 or higher ...iirc

...unless the error means the driver script was supposed to do something in the event cmpxchg wasn't found , and it failed ...???

Anyhow, a custom kernel might solve it both ways.

:)))Cool
 

I recompile the kernel for my computer as you said.And i followed your instructions..Voila ..it worked:))))
now i can play ut_2003 on my linux box:))lovely slackware:))

But i have one more question for you...The fglrx driver isnt fast enough to play games..i mean the linux gaming performance isnt equal to windows...is it normal?? if it is not what have i do??

Thank youu

UT2003 has been fully optimized for nVidia gfx chips ... ATI chipsets are not specifically designed for this game.
Whatever, I suggest than to fall back on Q3 or RTCW ... or the forthcoming Doom3 !

Fineee
 

Quake3 and RTCW are ok for now:))

But still i have some problems....i can't setup my tvcard.....i tried everything but i failed..pls help me..


i installed lastest bttv and xawtv

One More Question
 

And how can i activate FSAA and anisotropic filtering???

Thank you very much :))

To be honnest, TV issues are really not my speciality shop ... unfortunately.

Concerning FSAA, as I'm playing Q3 with pcmip value at 5 ... you guess that I mainly try to avoid any "quality textured loads" trying to reach the max fps possible always.

Sorry pal, this will have to be solved thnaks to someone who has more knowledge than me for this (translate : a lot of people) :D

Maybe, but i still get over 200fps in UT2003 with my radeon.

Wow, nice result.

As I'm only playing the demo of UT2K3 I guess it also has a bad incidence to my scratchy frames.

By the way, which parameter lets you see the #FPS in UT2K3 ?

I dunno, Id actually think u would get a higher FPS in the demo because there is only 1 player model. As for the FPS command:

stat fps

Type it again to hide.

Just a note: I tried the suggestions here and it worked for me also. But I did get an error when I did a startx...it was an AGP error. So, in rc.modules I modified "/sbin/modprobe agpgart" to look like "/sbin/modprobe agpgart agp_try_unsupported=1". This fixed my problem. The only thing that has me baffled are the poor frame rates. I got 10-15fps in UT2003. I don't believe that this is due to the Radeon chip or UT2003 and optimization for NVidia. There is no good reason why an Nvidia user can get over 200fps, but a Radeon user only gets 15fps...the drivers aren't THAT bad. There has to be something missing here. Any ideas?