My guess is a bug. I was using a Radeon 9200 up until I switched, during which I was under slackware 13.0, and 13.1's current. In KDE, it is pretty slow if you have effects turned on, so there could be problems there.

I'll maybe try a brandnew installation.. I might just throw a nvidia GeForce card at it (will try to remember to keep u posted if the brand new installation works)

It's simple. ATI has far better and cheaper (and less power-hungry) hardware right now. They're beating nVidia senseless, and it's to the point that most systems or motherboards aren't even shipping with nVidia anymore. So if you run Windows, get an ATI card, no question. In Linux, it's a different story and it's all about the drivers. As long as you are not using a bleeding edge kernel then the proprietary nVidia drivers are usually perfectly fine...I've had three different nVidia cards (two integrated and one discrete) with no problems at all, whatsoever -- though if you run bleeding edge kernels, you'll encounter issues. Sticking with Slackware stable will probably make life easy for you. For ATI, you can attempt to use the (crappy) proprietary drivers and hope for the best (again, probably can't use a bleeding edge kernel) or you can (*AT THIS POINT IN TIME*) go bleeding-edge kernel, mesa, xorg, the works and try your hand at the open source radeon drivers. For open source drivers, they're fantastic -- but they're not going to 'just work' with 3d acceleration much of the time and you may need to fiddle new versions of software (and it is not for the faint of heart yet). For the future, ATI is looking bright. As of right now, and the past few years, nVidia is just much easier and with better performance on Linux (but certainly not in Windows).

With the notable exception of the nouveau drivers (which are just as bad as [well, worse than] the ATI open source drivers in terms of setting it up properly, and certainly worse in terms of performance), the sheer number and detail of ATI threads on this forum (often with less-than-easy solutions) is frightening, whereas most nVidia problems are related to a bleeding-edge kernel (in -current, for example), trying to use nouveau, or trying to misuse the proprietary drivers.

I know you are heavily interested in ATI and you certainly are knowledgeable adamk75, but the fact remains that right now, nVidia is just better for Linux despite the worse hardware.

3 members found this post helpful.

That may by your opinion, certainly, but my experience with nvidia and their amazingly unstable drivers differs entirely from what you are saying.

Adam

Thank you everyone for sharing your experiences with ATI on Linux.

I think I will still buy the computer, but I'll be prepared to buy a new video card if there are problems.

My box:
Ati 2600XT 256 DDR3
Atlon X2 5200
2GB DDR2
Slackware64-current, kernel 2.6.35-rc2 #2 SMP PREEMPT
glxgears from 1295 to 1595... in box,
in full screan (Ful HD 1920X1080) from 93-103 FPS...

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I my self do not have an ATI video card, but I plan to buy a new laptop, so I am considering the hardware and my attention was drawn by this thread.

Today I by chance entered a computer shop and took a look at the laptops. There were HP, Acer and Dell, many of them with ATI Radeon video cards, shipping with Ubuntu Linux and KDE Desktop. I asked the system admins if there had been any problems with Linux and the ATI video cards. The answer was: "No, with Ubuntu and ATI there are no problems at all".

Regards,

Martin

the windows guy where I work bought some dell optiplex 760 for using as our desktops last year: he added to them an ati 3450 (for visual pleasure?).
after some struggling to make it work with 13.0 (when it came out it got 2.6.29 kernel and ati supported only 2.6.28) and -current I removed it from the pci-e slot and since then I'm using the intel motherboard-integrated chipset: this enforced my beliefs to never buy ati hardware.
on the opposite side I've always had nvidia at home (as I play enemy territory) and never had a problem, also with bleeding edge kernels (always found patches on nvidia forum).

just my 2 cent.

No offense, but the HD3450 worked fine with fglrx in Slackare 13.0 OOTB. Just running the driver installer with '--buildpkg Slackware/All' with the latest drivers available at the time 13.0 was release created slackware packages that could be installed and worked fine (with a HD3450, HD4350, and HD4850 on three separate machines here).

-current did have problems for a month or two.

Adam

Is there a database somewhere which records hardware that works out of the box with slackware or linux in general? Maybe we can setup a sticky poll right here in the forums. The data will be invaluable in future, especially considering many use slackware on older hardware. Hopefully this will alleviate the apprehension many feel during software upgrade or hardware purchase.

My own experience : video cards and wireless are the top grouses when trying to install a new distro.

adam, I tried that at the time (I used it with pain for some months), but I remember well that I had to downgrade the slackware stock kernel: that is a thing that I never had to do before.
then I moved to current using vesa, and after a while I waved ati bye-bye.

glad it worked for you.

Sorry, but if you had to downgrade the kernel, then there was something wrong with your installation. It worked great on Slackware 13.0 on the default kernel for me on three different machines.

Adam

Indeed there is:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/

Third link from the left in the blue bar at the top of every LQ page.
HCL = Hardware Compatibility List

Update on my 'problem': Nothing (really) wrong with slackware,.. only with the DVD disk or drive:

During installation, on slower systems, I tend to leave the installation running unattended: make me some coffee, take a leak etc. During the installation of 13.1 (freshly burned, Iso of md5sum ok), I noticed there was an error on the screen note-ing something like: 'The package is not correctly build'.. and after a pause it went to the next package from the installation. In the end, the installation finished without any comment on any packages not being correctly installed. I think that is an error in the slackware setup program (as I clearly wouldn't have noticed this if I would have returned half an hour later).

Anyways: I tried to make a copy of the disk to the harddrive on the machine, but it failed at the /x/ section.. dah!
I setup a NFS share (with the help of AlienBobs wiki), and selected this NFS as source. Turned out, everything works! ATI card is recognized, KDE works (Slow as hell in default config), XFCE runs like a charm, all in the default 1366x768 resolution of my widescreen monitor.

So yeah: works out of the box

on my noteboook with a radeon3650 ati-driver-installer-10-5-x86.x86_64.run builds and loads fine, no patch needed
but running fglrxinfo produces a segfault
dmesg:
fglrxinfo[2242]: segfault at 74ff006a ip b6f514ac sp bfdbabfc error 4 in fglrx_dri.so[b5a78000+1898000]

is this a known problem?