The experiences of an Australian student who uses Linux.
Cover all topics from shell scripts to monopolies and reviews to political comments.
Cover all topics from shell scripts to monopolies and reviews to political comments.
Debian & Fglrx
Posted 11-05-2010 at 07:42 PM by William (Dthdealer)
Tags amd, ati, debian squeeze, fglrx, radeon
I've decided to change from Ubuntu to Debian Testing again, after a bad encounter with the Ubuntu updater. Long story short, I did not know it was going to take 4+ hours to update from 10.04 to 10.10, and when I was informed, I just killed the system power in disgust.
Anyway, as with every system I've had on this laptop ( an Acer Aspire 5536 ) I've discovered why I will never buy ATI/AMD graphics hardware again. You have two driver options - xserver-radeon and fglrx.
The former is open-source and works better than fglrx for 2d rendering, video playback and actually supports my laptop res for framebuffer ( 1366x768, which fglrx does not ). On the other hand playing 3d games is nearly impossible, and my battery life of normal use is down to an hour.
FGLRX is closed source ( because AMD thinks their competitors will 'steal their advantages' if they OS it ) and buggy, but a must for any 3d game unfortunately.
I discovered however in Debian Squeeze, any openGL app would segfault If I tried to run it while using fglrx. I've finally discovered the solution:
Viola! It creates an appropriate Xorg.conf file and everything is hunky dory.
I still wish AMD/Ati would OS their drivers though.
Anyway, as with every system I've had on this laptop ( an Acer Aspire 5536 ) I've discovered why I will never buy ATI/AMD graphics hardware again. You have two driver options - xserver-radeon and fglrx.
The former is open-source and works better than fglrx for 2d rendering, video playback and actually supports my laptop res for framebuffer ( 1366x768, which fglrx does not ). On the other hand playing 3d games is nearly impossible, and my battery life of normal use is down to an hour.
FGLRX is closed source ( because AMD thinks their competitors will 'steal their advantages' if they OS it ) and buggy, but a must for any 3d game unfortunately.
I discovered however in Debian Squeeze, any openGL app would segfault If I tried to run it while using fglrx. I've finally discovered the solution:
Code:
sudo aticonfig --initial
I still wish AMD/Ati would OS their drivers though.
Total Comments 1
Comments
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You should have read forums more, before purchasing that stuff
AMD graphics support for linux is a big POS. You're lucky if you found working solution 
I'm quite experienced user, but even I couldn't manage to set up this mess in the past: see this. I just bought nv card and set it up in less than 2 minutes and still using itPosted 11-05-2010 at 08:01 PM by Web31337 
