Hi

A few weeks ago I read a news on the internet saying that freedesktop now will support ATI's x2800 driver. However, when I updated to the kernel 2.6.31. It seems I can not find any driver related to x2800. Where can I find the driver for this video card? Or where there contains such resource/ doc?

Thanks for help.

The x2800 appears to be an r600 piece. 2D support should be available via the 'radeon' Xorg module (or 'radeonhd' if you prefer, though I don't). 2D acceleration does require a 2.6.30.* kernel or higher, with the radeon DRM support either compiled in or as a module. 3D acceleration is only available with development code, and it is still in quite an experimental state.

Alternatively, of course, fglrx should support both 2D and 3D acceleration for that card.

Adam

Hi Adam,

Thanks your reply. I was using ati's driver (ati.amd.com) and it was broken after upgrading kernel to 2.6.29 with ati's proprietary driver (e.g. catalyst 8.x, 9.x). Then I read news somewhere else (I no longer can find it online now) saying that freedesktop will work on this using source code released from ati(?) because ati/amd no longer support this card.

At the moment I am using vesa, which supports 2D. Is vesa the same as radeon?

In addition, is this url (http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/) the right place if I want check the development progress of ati r600 (e.g. x2800)?

Thanks againg for your help.

First, this is the best place to see the status of the open source 3D driver:

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

Second, AMD/ATI did not release any source code, but they did release all the necessary specifications to write open source drivers.

Third, if your card is an r600 family GPU, as I suspect (what is the output of 'lspci | grep -i vga'), then it is still supported by the catalyst drivers. You may need a newer driver than the one you currently have, though, for 2.6.29 support. Catalyst 9.9 is definitely supposed to work on kernel 2.6.29.

The vesa driver is not the same as the radeon driver. The vesa driver provides no 2D acceleration. The radeon driver should be installed, by default, on every linux distribution available these days. You would just need to specify 'Driver "radeon" ' in the Device section of your xorg.conf file. But, again, you won't get 3D acceleration unless you download and install some experimental development code, which I would not recommend unless you really know what you're doing.

Adam

I remembered the wrong type. The card on my laptop is x2300

But I'd tried ati/amd catalyst newer version e.g. 9.x. It either won't get compiled or is compiled, but reboot will show X server error. I've heard that ati/amd no longer support this card type; and that's why I am looking if freedesktop.org's free driver is released or not.

At the moment I switch to use radeon. That looks better.

Thanks again for providing such useful information.

I appreacite it.