Legacy ATI driver on current kernel? (>= 4.4.88)
 

I have a 6 or 7 year old HP Compaq 6005 Pro with an ATI HD 4200 video chipset. It's not much of a machine, but it works for what we do with it. Problem - this chipset requires the "legacy" ATI driver, and ATI does not update their legacy drivers to work with newer kernels. I have found articles describing how to use their legacy drivers with kernels from the early 4.x series, but nothing describing how to make it work with 4.4.88, which is what Slackware 14.2 is currently using.

Does anyone know of a way to get it to work with this newer kernel, or are we just stuck with the open source radeon driver?

Trust me, the problem is bigger than that, because you need not only an older kernel, but also to compile yourself an older X.org, and so on...

Long story short: NOPE, you will not manage that unless you are a Slackware Guru, able to (re-)build yourself major parts of the distribution. Then, there is no need for you to ask that here. ;)

Meanwhile, the crowd will look condescendingly at you, for using "obsolete" hardware, and will blame that shameless AMD for daring to not going along with Slackware's graphics stack... :D

My suggestion is to stay in an older version, i.e. 14.0 or latest you manage to make it work.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that for older AMD cards, the open source drivers, compared to the proprietary drivers, will now generally yield results as good or even slightly better. AMD apparently co-operated reasonably well with the developers of the open drivers, and I see few complaints about their closed-source drivers leaving old cards behind, so that could be a good sign.

In short being "stuck" with the open drivers might not be too bad nowadays. But YMMV, have you tried them, are they noticeably worse in some way?

And indeed it helps to not have to worry about updates to other components of the system break the closed-source driver.
Congrats by the way for getting the most out of that somewhat older computer.

I used to run my half-life servers on an old 32 bit Athlon machines. Worked great. Until one day Valve recompiled with SSE2 enabled. 32 bit Athlons don't support SSE2. With one fell swoop, four perfectly good servers became obsolete, and I eventually scrapped them.

This machine is used to watch Netflix videos, FoxNews, and facebook games. I had Slackware 14.1 on it a few years ago and it worked great for that, but I vaguely recall using the proprietary ATI driver.

I'm thinking of forking out $40 for a GT710. Not much of a video card by today's standards, but probably light years ahead of the onboard chipset. Before I do that, I'm going to finish loading this and see how it works with the open source driver. I think if the user is happy, I'll just leave it as it.

And yes, I finally tossed all of my old ISA cards. I still have a stack of IDE drives, some brand new - 120 and 160GB drives I just never got around to using...

TYVM everyone!

@Ook
it is easy as 2+2:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...4/#post5516670

I prefer after patching:
# ./ati-installer 15.201 --buildpkg Slackware/Slackware
# upgradepkg --install-new fglrx-15.201.1151-x86_64-1.tgz
instead of
# ./ati-installer.sh 15.201 --install

You can find binary xorg-*-1.17.4 packages at
ftp://ftp.pieskovisko.sk/pub/slackwa...t/slackware/x/
ftp://ftp.pieskovisko.sk/pub/slackwa...t/slackware/x/
This "mirror" has hystorical packages (doesn't delete upgraded packages).

Does that work for the legacy driver too though? 15.201 already didn't support HD4200 anymore, as far as I can tell.

And even that thread says:
Modern 3D games are out of scope here I think.

By the way, just using Slackware 14.1 again is not necessarily a bad option either I think, if the open source drivers disappoint. It still gets security updates, it's not obsolete.

Fresh chromium with the plugins you'd need for browser video and games are available for it too, thanks to alienbob's great work.
http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/peo...s/14.1/x86_64/

As for support.amd.com, HD 4200 needs Catalyst 13.1 which compatible with Xorg 6.9 to Xserver 1.12 and Kernel version up to 3.4.
There is patch to support kernel upto 3.8.x:
http://henryhermawan.blogspot.ru/201...ernel-38x.html
or 3.10
https://github.com/kolasa/fglrx-13.101

So my bad, I don't know about Catalyst 13.1 with Slackware 14.2.

Maybe 14.0 will be good choice for that.

The OSS drivers should work out of the box on this chip on Slackware 14.2. While you got an IGP, I still use my HD 4670 based on the same driver stack, which I purchased 7 years ago and it worked out of box then too. I'm not sure what you mean that it is not working on Kernel 4.4.