You know, their reason is a load of BS and a flat-out lie. Their competitors conduct industrial espionage, they possess electron microscopes and can reverse-engineer or even copy chip masks directly just by viewing the GPUs, and they can decompile the drivers using SoftICE or other similar debug/decompiling application suites.

There is NOTHING that they could possibly give away to a competitor by documenting:


(note, I am making these addresses up, it's been ten years since I've coded anything for video, in 1993 or 1994 I was DETERMINED to get 32-bit color running with a DiamondMM (now part of ATI) Stealth32 card and had to probe the entire video address range to learn what did what. End result: I figured out what did what, extended the ET4000 X server and got it running. That was the first and last bit of assembly I ever did on x86, I had just come from the C=128 and Amiga platforms where I wrote a good amount of assembly)

Register Purpose
0xc7FF Change video mode
bit foo0: X resolution
bit foo1: Y resolution
bit foo3,4 color depth
0xC806 Horizontal sync
0xC810 Vertical refresh

0xE716 Enable TV output
0xE728 Tuner channel
0xE814 VIVO stream

What kind of advantage would that give their competitors?

If you cannot figure it out, let me tell you:

NONE WHATSOEVER.

Their "explanation" is total hogwash.

Incidentally, I just upgraded to a Hauppauge tuner card so I can actually get a tuner working with MythTV. Good-bye All in Wonder cards.

Gosh, after reading this thread, I'm not sure if I need to install ATI drivers. I'm using radeon 92000. Although drivers not installed, colors looks alright. Is it still neccessary to install the drivers for my graphic card? How can I tell if it's working after installation? I don't really know what's the purpose of updating the driver

i'm not sure, but i think *one *of the reasons is to obtain 3D hardware acceleration... if that's the case, and you're fine without 3D hardware acceleration, then you should be okay without the proprietary drivers...

the ATI fglrx drivers do not support anything older than a Radeon 9500. Even then it's hard work getting it working.

For best results with a 9200, and 3d support, use the Xorg radeon driver and enable DRI.

Tell you what, I installed the drivers.

# sh [ati installer]
# aticonfig --initial

And it works. Except, there are wierd aspects.

glxinfo reports it works, though only in root, nothing else.

Before drivers glxgears at ~600 fps, now ~400 - hmm??

fgl_glxgears similar.

Oh and it goes to 1280x1024, which is too small on my 17" monitor and has large fonts. I want 1024x768 normal fonts.

There are always problems...

Oh and also...(something completely different)

When booting it mentions something about IRQ problems.
And the Happauge TV Tuner card doesn't work - how do I install drivers for it?

Anyone?

It is quite a problem...

ATI just released drivers yesterday for linux. I believe it's 8.30.3. Try those.

yep, ATI's pretty hard to setup. but there are always some workaround.. just try googling..

Could you give us more information on that? Can you locate these irq messages in /var/log/messages or /var/log/boot.msg (don't know if this file exists in your distro) and post them here?

Can you also give the output of lspci? (try /sbin/lspci if it doesn't work)

In addition, try to see your bios settings and documentation because irq problems usually are caused by wrong settings in the bios.

EDIT: Seems like this is the wrong post for solving this problem. Try starting a new thread and post a link here. You will get more responses from experts in irq conflicts if the thread title says something about it.

Getting Hauppauge tuners running is a bit of a pain, and don't expect any TV apps besides Myth to work with it.

Check out http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=579 -- although it's an ubuntu tutorial it will point you in the right direction. The single most difficult part is figuring out which firmware you need to install.

The new ATI drivers are out. AMD has taken over the ATI website and all is beginning to become good in the ATI linux world. I've heard AMD is thinking is thinking of letting the ATI drivers be open source!!!!

Oh, and the ATI drivers are NOT that hard!! GOOD GOD! Just follow instructions! Oh, and if you use gentoo or a gentoo based version of linux you can just type

emerge ati-drivers

and viola! its installed. I've installed them in slackware before just using the installer and the installer makes rpms and suse packages if you read instructions!!!

AFAIK, since this is the Slackware forum, none of the above applies.

And as far as being easy, ATI is improving, but Nvidia still has them by the short hairs on ease of use and support.

I've got some shares in a mustard mine that I'm willing to let go at a good price ....

I would like to share what I have done so my ATI drivers to work with 3D Acceleration..

Specs:
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9550 256MB
Distro: Slackware 11
Kernel: 2.6.17.13 (disc2 of Slackware 11)

First, when installing your slackware, include the kernel source.. this is important..

After installing slackware, you can opt to upgrade your kernel or just stay with 2.4.x.. it doesn't matter as long as you included the kernel source...

Install ati-driver-installer-8.30.3.run which can be found on ati's website..

choose auto-install. fglrx will find your linux source code and compile a new module for your fglrx. there should be no errors on the last prompt.. it should say "Installation Complete!"

don't reboot yet. run 'aticonfig --initial' then edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and remove the comments on

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

add a new line on your /etc/fstab "tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0" , and make sure you have a blank line after it..

reboot..

that's it!

check my sig for more info.

Most of that is already posted in my "DRI" thread, plus much, much more.

Link in my sig