ATI legacy drivers - please help

English Hardware
1

Hello!

I went through really a lot of Linux systems, and I think I am going to settle on Opensuse OS. I must say Opensuse 11.3 is fantastic! However I have this lousy in the top 5 of evil graphic cards list ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 card. This version of Opensuse seems to best realize what creature it is and gives the biggest description of it in the hardware information from all Linux distros I have tried. Unfortunately I have a big trouble to install proprietary drivers. I downloaded the recommended drives from amd-ati homepage but on debian and ubuntu installing via terminal simply reports an error while Opensuse doens;t even try to run the ati run file of drivers.

Could somebody please assist me and give recommendations what to do in order to install proprietary legacy drivers? Keep in mind I am a complete newbie. The only thing I am good at with terminal is copy/paste. I learned how to add repos to the yeast and successfully added amd ati repo to the lsit, but it still doens;t seem to give anything suitable in my case.

I do believe it would be a valuable source for people looking for steps instruction related to legacy drivers so lets consider this something like How To Escape ATI Legacy Drivers Nightmares thread.

Thank you very much for your time!

2

I went through really a lot of Linux systems, and I think I am going to settle on Opensuse OS. I must say Opensuse 11.3 is fantastic! However I have this lousy in the top 5 of evil graphic cards list ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 card. This version of Opensuse seems to best realize what creature it is and gives the biggest description of it in the hardware information from all Linux distros I have tried. Unfortunately I have a big trouble to install proprietary drivers.

OpenSUSE 11.3 uses a version of Xorg that does not support the legacy proprietary ATI driver. The default open source radeon driver is the only driver available now to support this ‘legacy’ graphics hardware. (This appies to all recent Linux distros).

openSUSE Graphic Card Practical Theory Guide for Users

3

Hello!

Thank you very much for your reply!
SO your recommendation would be to downgrade to older Linux? From things I see the Xorg suggested drivers doens’t seem to support acceleration of things like OGL on latest Kernel. While for 2D stuff its is ok and my systems runs quite well, for 3D I need proprietary drivers. I tried all action I found in the instruction pages but it didn;t seem to work.

Could someone please recommend a linux distribution that should work well and would still be secure? To my understanding Older Linux that are short term are no longer supported once a new version is out.

Thank you very much for your time and help!

4

If you need the proprietary driver, then I would try openSUSE 11.2. From memory that uses an older Xorg server version comaptible with the older driver.

5

My memory is it (the proprietary driver) works with 11.1 but not 11.2 and one needs to use Catalyst 9.3. One can find 11.1 here: software.opensuse.org: Download openSUSE 11.1 … but it won’t be there for long as support for 11.1 is stopping soon.

Reference: AMD Catalyst™ Display Driver version 9.3

6

Thanks for clarifying Lee. I couldn’t remember which version was ok with the Catalyst driver. (I was ok using openSUSE 11 and the fglrx driver, but then skipped straight to 11.3 and now consigned to using the radeon driver)

7

Hello!

Thank you very much!

I shall download Opensuse 11.1 (I thought of interesting thing, Opensuse as it comes from two words Open and Suse could be shortened to “OS” :slight_smile: ) and see how well it works.
If I succeed to use two apps on wine and OS 11.1 then I will migrate to OS 11.3 with my other pc as well. That one shouldn;t have troubles with drivers, it plays really well with all distros I tried it on :slight_smile: it is a pity to downgrade, I really like OS 11.3, it is really very much solid!

Any chances that Opensuse keeps their old files downloadable in some sort of legacy downloads section? this would be nice…
Well anyway, Thank you very much!
Off to check the 11.1

8

Someone pointed out to me in another thread the EOL mirrors kept by the openSUSE community (and not by Novell):

EOL Mirrors

* Mirrors for EOL openSUSE and SuSE are still around. While it is recommended to upgrade to the newest versions is some cases you just want to download a package or two. Use these mirrors for those cases: 

        http://mirror.fraunhofer.de/opensuse.org/distribution/ 
        ftp://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/discontinued/ 
        ftp://ftp.hosteurope.de/mirror/ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/discontinued/i386/ 
        http://mirror.fraunhofer.de/ftp.suse.com/suse/i386/ 
        ftp://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/discontinued/
9

Yes, downgrading is really only a temporary solution. Just be aware that 11.1 is near EOL (as oldcpu already mentioned):

End of openSUSE-11.1 support (end year 2010)

10

Hello!

Thank you very much!
OS 11.1 works like a charm. I can see the settings for 3D and other stuff! This is very nice.

I would be more than glad to return to OS 11.3 or at least 11.2, unfortunately ATI Catalyst 9.3 just won’t install on these. Well Catalyst center installs but no drivers. And it tells me that either no driver is installed or it is set up incorrectly. Well I suppose I will have to stay with OS 11.1 for a while. I wish ATI would then make their legacy drivers for Linux opensource so people who has older hardware could still enjoy up to date systems.

Well anyway, Thank you very much for your help! Finally I can do some 3D stuff on that pc as well :slight_smile:

One question not on the topic, OS 11.1 will still be secure to connect to the internet or should I take a look at some advanced firewalls and stuff like that?
Thank you for your time and help!
Best regards

11

One question not on the topic, OS 11.1 will still be secure to connect to the internet or should I take a look at some advanced firewalls and stuff like that?

You don’t need to do anything different than if you were using openSUSE 11.3. Sure, there will not be any further security patches or software updates in a few months time, but openSUSE already has a firewall enabled by default, so as long as you’re not logged in as root, you should be safe.

In the meantime, I suggest you try a few LiveCD distros as time progresses. You may find that the radeon driver is sufficiently developed to obtain reasonable performance with your graphics chipset.

12

ATI are unlikely to provide legacy drivers for the latest kernels. Who is going to pay them to do so ?

The best hope for those with legacy hardware is that the open source radeon driver improves sufficiently to provide the desired performance.

I think it is secure enough, but it depends on what you are using it for. … If only as an average desktop home user, then openSUSE-11.1 should be fine. But if you are running an apache server or someother Internet service then I would caution against using it after the support stops.

Eventually you will find with 11.1 that the latest application updates won’t install, due to library’s being out of date. While it is possible to maintain most libraries, it will become more and more difficult.

The question I would ask is the eye candy of 3D/special desktop effects worth the negative aspects (of not always being able to run the latest versions of some applications).

13

Hello!

No I don’t run any services, it is only a home desktop which I plan to use for some light 3D creations, this is why I need 3D acceleration support for and some internet browsing.
I will keep on testing live CDs from time to time.
Thank you for your help!

14

I just wanted to get this topic up to date again since this thread dates from 2010. We’re 2012 now and the future for some legacy ATI cards isn’t bright.
I’m owner of a Fujitsu Siemens laptop that has an Intel dualcore cpu, but the graphics card is an ATI mobility Radeon x1300 (M52).

Currently running openSUSE 11.4. The card hasn’t run decently since openSUSE 11.1 with prop. drivers installed. At least it runs now! There where times when it wasn’t even possible for me to get display, unless tempering with unstable repositories etc…

So we’re stuck with what the open source drivers provide us. In my case… A nomodeset at the bootline wich gives me a workable desktop without 3D and with artifacts all over the screen. I’m wondering if it’s worthed waiting for this situation to get better or to sell the machine (with windows) and buy another one with a more supported graphics card. The other solution would be running Windows myself, but no thanks… not for me.

Is there any driver developer guru willing to tell if possible if i should wait any longer for better support for my card? I get the impression all efforts are going out to support newer ATI cards instead of making the old ones work the way they should. I’m not talking about performance since i’m not interested how well the card performs. I just want to be able to boot without the need for “nomodeset” and get rid of the artifacts so i can see what i type instead of all kinds of stange colors and stripes.

I guess if this question can be answered… a lot of people will be reliefed. I just want to know, like many of us, is it worth waiting for something what might never be?

Greetz,
Kenny

15

You question will NOT be answered on this forum. We are neither graphic developers nor are we graphic gurus.

Did you try anything more than ‘nomodeset’ and disabling 3D to fix your graphics ? Did you start a separate thread ask for help to tune the X1300 ? Did you review the content of the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file looking for help ?

Did you check to see there was a regression in this radeon driver bug that was supposed to be fixed: Access Denied ?

and if there is a bug regression , then per that bug report did you try to test the work around:

Workaround for R5xx users (Radeon X1xx series)

  • disable KMS by adding ‘nomodeset’ to kernel boot options
    (/boot/grub/menu.lst).
  • add the following section to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf

Section “Module”
Disable “dri”
Disable “dri2”
EndSection

… anyway, … I don’t have any answers nor solutions.

I only have a suggestion that you could better post in your own thread (with an appropriate subject).

16

On 2012-01-30 20:26, oldcpu wrote:
> I only have suggestions as to where you could better post.

I think that there are some people on the openSUSE mail list that stay
current with the status of that driver.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)