we are considering to purchase a laptop that comes with the ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5430 Graphics Card with 512 MB Ram but unable to get a test with a live cd
anyone know /using this card and can confirm that it is working okay with linux?
If you type ‘man radeon’ and also type ‘man radeonhd’ on an openSUSE-11.3 you will see that the opensource radeon driver and the opensource radeonhd driver do NOT support that card (at least support for it is NOT mentioned in the man page). Hence when installing openSUSE-11.3 you will need to install using the FBDEV graphic driver or the VESA graphic driver.
Once installed, your performance with either of those two drivers will be relatively poor, and you will likely want a superior graphic driver. According to the ATI web site the ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5400 series is supported by the proprietary Catalyst driver (version 10.9 and probably 10.10 (they have not updated their release note)).
If you surf google on that card, you will note some users of other linux distributions have it working with the proprietary ATI graphic driver.
Note I do not have that graphic card … I just have access to the documentation like anyone else.
oldcpu , thanks for the info.
I had for all these time been using nvidia cards and actually uses the proprietary nvidia driver (ftp://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/11.3/)
Any idea if installing the ATI proprietary Catalyst driver is the “same” as installing the proprietary nvidia driver, or is it a totally different (technically challenging) experience ?
Because accordingly to this website SDB:ATI drivers - openSUSE
there should be drivers here (http://www2.ati.com/suse/11.3) but the link is somehow broken
Installing the ATI proprietary driver is not difficult, but it took me a number of installs before I became comfortable with it. It is not that different from the nVidia method, but it does have an extra couple of steps.
I typically ‘build’ / ‘install’ the driver the ‘hardway’. Which means before doing anything, FIRST install kernel-source, kernel-syms and the base development package. This is true for both ATI and nVidia.
Then for nvidia I would run the .run file from run level 3 with:
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-256.53.run -q
restart and it was done. For 11.3 it was originally necessary to specify nomodeset and to blacklist the nouveau driver, but I think the latest NVIDIA proprietary drivers work around that.
For ATI one does something similar … ie in run level 3 type something like:
sh ati-driver-installer-10-9-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg SuSE/SUSE113-AMD64
but that does NOT install the driver. Rather it builds an fglrx rpm where the rpm must be installed next, with something like:
zypper in <name-of-fglrx-rpm-here.
and restart and it should work. One ‘trick’ is one must remove any previous versions of the fglrx rpm before building/installing.
There was a time where one had to create an xorg.conf file for these proprietary drivers, but with 11.3 thats no longer the case for most hardware (graphic cards/monitors).
I simplified the above a bit, but that is in essence what is needed. Sometimes an extra step or two is needed if one has a hiccup.
oldcpu,
thanks again for the advise.