So I’ve been trying Ubuntu and Mint the last couple of weeks but they didn’t support drivers for my video card in any relatively current releases and ran pretty slow. I researched that OpenSUSE was much better for really old systems. It’s definitely running much faster but I wanted to update my graphics drivers to improve the speed that images are loading on web pages (it’s not connection speed) and some other things. I see that 12.3’s official documentation says:
that fglrx and fglrx-legacy drivers are supported however my video card is the Radeon Xpress 1150 and according to ATI’s website the latest driver that supports my video card is the AMD Catalyst driver ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86,x86_64.run
When I installed the 9.3 driver on Ubuntu or Mint it messed the OS and I had to reformat, after doing more research I realized that these drivers are not supported in any recent versions.
Is this 9.3 driver supported by OpenSUSE 12.3? And if not, how should I go about updating my graphics driver? I also noticed in my Yast hardware information that OpenSUSE detects my video card as Radeon Xpress 200 which is not correct. Thank you for any assistance.
None of the AMD drivers are supported by SuSE-GmbH. These are proprietary graphic drivers, provided by AMD, and AMD provide the support. SuSE-GmbH do NOT provide AMD proprietary driver support.
The AMD drivers will work with openSUSE versions, with the functionality dependant on the openSUSE version and the AMD driver version. The link noted by Sauerland gives a good summary of the AMD support for GNU/Linux (and the versions of the kernal and the versions of X). Your older Radeon Xpress 1150 is not supported by a recent AMD proprietary driver and it definitely will not work with the latest kernels nor with the latest versions of X.
In summary, the AMD driver will not work with openSUSE-12.3 with your older Radeon Xpress 1150.
There is no update to the open source radeon driver (for openSUSE) that I am aware of.
Are you certain the radeon graphic driver is being used on your PC and not the vesa nor fbdev driver ?
You could type ‘man radeon’ in a terminal and read up on the options for tuning the radeon driver but that is likely a painful non-fruitful approach (IMHO). You may be better off surfing the web to see if someone else has posted parameters to use with an older Radeon Xpress 1150 and the radeon graphic driver and if you find such, see if application of any such suggestions improve the performance of the radeon driver.
To be clear, having typed the above, I myself have no such suggestions for you. But that is how I would go about this if it were me.
Another approach is to go to the appropriate radeon open source development site and write a bug report on the radeon driver misidentifying your hardware. That may, or may not, result in some suggestions on that hardware. Given the age of the driver, I myself would not be too hopefull. Still, and again, that might be how I would go about this if it were me.
The Xpress 1150 is reported as Xpress 200 simply because they are one and the same thing.
Given my answer, you can see that that wouldn’t be a particularly good suggestion – as it would be wasteful of resources (the OPs, anyone who read’s the bug report, and the person(s) who would have to close the report to a non-existant problem). Let that stand as a lesson in efficiency, you energy inefficient old cpu rotfl!
So what I’m gathering from all of your posts is that the default OS install provides the best hardware instructions possible for a computer as old as mine to run on any fairly new linux distro?
That being the case, am I correct in assuming that I’ve done all that I can in terms of how OpenSUSE uses my hardware to improve performance and that any further improvement can only come from customizing settings and tweaking the OS to run how I want it to? This was my next step anyway, to dive into the OS and start tweaking, but I wanted to make sure I covered all my bases with hardware first and got all that works as best I could.
To say it another way… when I format a new computer with windows, the first thing I do is update all the drivers and then I start tweaking and customizing windows. Have I done all I can for the ‘update all drivers’ phase with OpenSUSE? Thanks for the help.
lol ! Which pretty sums up my knowledge here … Speaking of energy efficient, reminds me of my sandbox PC. Everytime I switch it on in the evening, the lights all across Europe dim !! rotfl!
I recall asking if you were certain the radeon graphic driver is being used on your PC and not the vesa nor fbdev driver ? I can not say ‘yes’ to your question without mine being answered.
Now if the radeon driver loaded, then you likely have the best driver loaded but it may not be optimized. However to optimize for your hardware likely requires specific knowledge from someone with identical old hardware who has taken the time to research this and test this. And there may be no further optimisation. I simply do not know and can not answer your question whether it is possible to better tune the radeon drivers performance. Note if you type ‘man radeon’ it provides indications as to some things that can be tuned. Typing ‘man x’ and ‘man xorg.conf’ provides many more options which may work for hardware and not for others and I have no idea whether some would help and some would not.
Note also - before I go further, that on this forum we are volunteers and not the developers nor the packagers of openSUSE.
Well, for relatively modern nvidia and relatively modern AMD hardware on a GNU/Linux release that is not so cutting edge, that is also possibly true for GNU/Linux. But not always.
You likely have done all that is ‘easy’. Whether you can improve more can only be answered from someone with identical hardware who is likely an advanced GNU/Linux user who has spent a lot of time researching your specific hardware. That eliminates me.
How can I check this? Yast Hardware Information says I’m using Radeon Xpress 200, and I have a vanilla install of OpenSUSE 12.3 GNOME desktop so I haven’t done anything to the graphics drivers yet at all.
Thanks for the help, I couldn’t figure out how to check which drivers are being used on google but I’m on my way out the door and didn’t have time to research thoroughly.
This information is stored in a log file. Log files are typically kept in the directory /var/log.
Look inside the file /var/log/Xorg.0.log …
If you see many entries with (II)Radeon and (==)Radeon then likely you are using the Radeon driver. If instead you see many with (II)Vesa and (==)Vesa then likely you are using the Vesa driver
21.860] (II) Loadmodule: “vesa”
21.877] (II) Loading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/vesa_drv.so
21.877] (II) Module vesa: vendor=“X.Org Foundation”
21.877] compiled for 1.13.1, module version = 2.3.2
21.877] Module class: X.Org Video Driver, version 13.1
21.877] (II) RADEON: Driver for ATI Radeon chipsets:
and then it lists a bunch of video card chipsets (incidently this computer is not supported by the Radeon linux driver
I’m wiling to bet 50,000 kronkites that you’re mistaken, and that your system is supported by the radeon driver, and that you/we would see that if you posted the entire log at SUSE paste (and provided the link)
Alternatively, you could open up a terminal and just check whether the radeon driver is loaded with:
It could be your PC is using the Radeon graphic driver, based on that brief content, but I really need to see more. What can happen is various drivers are loaded and then unloaded during the boot process. So please can you copy the content of the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file to the website SUSE Paste and paste it there and press contribute and then it will give you a web/URL address where the content that you pasted is located. Please then post that web/URL address here so we can examine the file contents and interpret it for you.
and if you open a terminal and type “man radeon” you will see:
RS400/RS480 **Radeon XPRESS 200**(M)/1100 IGP
and as you posted, openSUSE appears to identify your PC’s graphic card as an Xpress 200. So if you then put 'radeon xpress 1150 200" into google, it will lead you to this as the TOP link on that page: Xpress 200 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia where I quote from that:
**Radeon Xpress 200**
DDR-RAM support
5.1 / 7.1 High Definition audio support
The integrated graphics are based on the ATI Radeon X300 GPU with full OpenGL 2.0 and DirectX 9.0 support
**Later renamed as Radeon Xpress 1150 for AMD notebooks**
so X1150 is the notebook version of X200.
and if we look in that file we see:
21.188] (II) RADEON(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen section
"Default Screen Section" for depth/fbbpp 24/32
21.188] (==) RADEON(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32
21.188] (II) RADEON(0): Pixel depth = 24 bits stored in 4 bytes (32 bpp pixmaps)
21.188] (==) RADEON(0): Default visual is TrueColor
21.188] (==) RADEON(0): RGB weight 888
21.188] (II) RADEON(0): Using 8 bits per RGB (8 bit DAC)
21.188] (--) RADEON(0): Chipset: "ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 5974 (PCIE)" (ChipID = 0x5974)
Your PC is using the radeon driver which is good news.
The hard part now is trying to figure out code to improve its performance.
The other good news is you can surf on improving performance for both the X200 and the X1150, as what works for one should work for the other.
BUT before you try any of them , be certain you have a backup up plan as to how you can remove any applied setting if it causes your graphics not to load.
… Speaking of energy efficient, reminds me of my sandbox PC. Everytime I switch it on in the evening, the lights all across Europe dim !! rotfl!
