ATi linux made difficult for debian
 

i love debian, i really do. it is fast, more efficient and responsive....but what the hell man. installing things not specifically made for debian makes things so much more difficult than what they have to be.

everytime i try to make a custom kernel using the instructions or debian.org, i run into a kernel panic.

my serious problem now is that i am trying to install the ati driver by following the documentation on http://xoomer.virgilio.it/flavio.sta...installer.html but that doesnt work because my kernel has drm compiled into the stock kernel (2.4.26). i really dun know if i should use the 2.6 version because 2.4 is all that i know and it works perfctly fine for moi. so yeah can any one help me with this damned ati driver. i dun see why they only make it in rpm format, what about a .deb or even a tar (that would be smart of them)? and i want my tv in funtionallity but gatos doesn't even work and i'm tired of ati refering me to that project.

yes right now i am just disgruntled cause my 3d games don't work (due to 3d driver issues).

I had a rough time getting ATI drivers installed on my machine a few weeks ago too, but you just gotta keep at it. I know its frusterating, and its true that ATI needs to realize there is more than one distro out there. All I can tell you is you found the right guide to getting things working. I would actually suggest that you try installing a 2.6.x kernel and trying to get support on that. I installed the stock 2.6.7 kernel package and used that as my source for installing the ATI drivers and it worked fine. You can always keep your 2.4 kernel on your system as a backup (I still have my 2.4 kernel active, but I haven't used it in weeks now). Good luck, and if you get stuck I'll try to help ya out, even though I myself am a :newbie:

why would you compile DRM into the kernel, or does that stand for something else?

anyway, sign this petition http://www.petitiononline.com/atipet/ to get better support in linux

Off topic: nice project, that hero of allacrost, r00ts. Are you the only one working on it? I'm also working on a game right now, a fun project, cause I'm such a n00b on it :). Succes with your game!

have a kernel question
 

ohk, i upgraded my kernel and i have yet to install the ati drivers again (havent tried yet).
what is the main difference between the 2.4 kernels and the 2.6 kernels. i read that the 2.6 handles better with server apps but that's about the only difference that i know of.

An important differrence is the 2.6 kernel is preemptive (if you turn that feature on). That makes the kernel more responsive.

The 2.6 kernel also has more drivers for new hardware. For me switching to 2.6 resulted in better sound support, but it depends on your hardware of course.

Re: ATi linux made difficult for debian
 

IIRC, you have to apply a certain patch to the vanilla kernel to get it working in Debian (or use the Debian kernel source package). I can't recall what the patch's name is or what it's doing. I saw it in some "compile the kernel for Debian"-tutorial.

/TLV

Re: have a kernel question
 

Here's a classic document highlighting the 2.6 kernel:

http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/docs/po...loween-2.6.txt

Then of course, things have evolved further with the later releases...

/TLV

I had no problems at all installing the ATi fglrx drivers after compiling the kernel module and building the DEBs.

My problem is that upon using Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, the X server locks up (itself AND the console). I refuse to use the drivers until this issue is resolved in some way - losing the use of that keystroke is not an option.

My config files are as follows:

http://www.pryan.org/mozilla/site/Th...fig-oldDrivers (the original file; this one works fine)

http://www.pryan.org/mozilla/site/Th...fig-newDrivers (a handmade file that uses fglrx)

http://www.pryan.org/mozilla/site/Th...F86Config-auto (the autogenerated file from fglrxconfig)

Re: Re: ATi linux made difficult for debian
 

Just for completion: the patch is a cramfs-patch. "Have to" is up to discussion. See this page: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/re...kernel.en.html

/TLV

problem with MS Precision Pro
 

well i notice that my joystick does not work in debian at all . the joydev and sidewinder moduels are loaded but deb says that it cannot find a joystick in /dev/input/js0-4 or /dev/js0-4. what is up with that. does this in the 2.4 kernels and the 2.6.8 kernel that i have now. this did work in redhat (with 2.4 kernels). And i am still i the process of installing the ATi driver (haven't gotten to that yet...school is very cumbersome).

To quote myself:

I've just discovered that this problem extends to all the various ways of shutting down the X server - even logging out of one's windowing environment is enough to trigger the lockup.

I've been :study: the documentation here in case I missed something, but so far I haven't a clue as to why this is happening. Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do next?

When I was writing a program with SDL it told me I had 0KB video memory and that I was running the x11 (software) drive. After looking it up in the SDL Wiki I found this: http://www.libsdl.org/cgi/docwiki.cg...20Acceleration. glxgears *seemed* ok (2500FPS or so, but there was some weird, short periodic glich). And glxinfo | grep direct told me "yes". I'm not sure if this is a SDL problem, a problem with my code, or a problem with ATI. But I hope its a problem with my code, because I know how to fix that at least :D




Thanks. :) No there are 7 others on my staff right now, although I'm positive I'm doing the most work out of anyone. ;) Its funny, because thanks to working on my game I found out the information about my video setup above.


EDIT: I'm the 10,074th person to sign the ATI Linux driver petition. You'd THINK that with over 10,000 people agreeing not to buy ATI video cards they'd start to get a little worried. If the average video card sells for $200 (I'm making a guess here) that is a nice $2,000,000 chunk out of ATI's income.

They sell for mroe - up to $350 USD :eek:

So that comes out to nearly 3.5 million USD - almost 4.6 million CAD.

You can use an unofficial ATI package that allows the use of apt-get. http://xoomer.virgilio.it/flavio.sta...installer.html This worked great for my ATI card. I am running Debian unstable with 2.6.5 kernel.