Re: [Flightgear-users] [Fwd: drivers]

[leee <le...@sp...>]

On Friday 17 Jul 2009, James J. Brennan wrote:
> I have purchased a new Dell laptop which has an ATI Radeon
> Mobility HD 3670 vido card installed.
>
> I've placed FEDORA 11 (32 bit) on it and downloaded Flightgear
> which fails to run.  (I also tried the Fedora 11, 64 bit version
> with the same result)
>
> Problem is that the drivers that I have do not support hardware
> accel.
>
> I've downloaded what I think is the correct driver installation
> package from ATI, but after installing it I lost the video
> display!
>
> (What I have is  " ati-driver-installer-9-5-x86.x86_64.run ".)
>
> I uninstalled it (with some difficulty) and now have the display
> back, but (of course) Flightgear still is inop.
>
> Has anyone had any luck in getting this card to work?
> Any thoughts will be appreciated!
>
> jj
>
> http://kingmont.com
>
> P.S.  I sent this to the developers list, but it was suggested
> (tactfully I might add) that this might be a better place.

I saw your posting to the dev list and can't say that I thought 
you'd get a better response on the user list.  I guess it's just 
possible that other users might have found a way to get ATI's linux 
drivers working properly but personally, I doubt it.  While the ATI 
hardware seems pretty good they _still_ seem to be incapable of 
writing a Linux driver that works and provides full OpenGL 1.x 
functionality ,let alone OGL 2/3 features.

Sadly, this isn't just a recent thing; I was beta testing the linux 
version of a proprietary 3D package quite a few years ago and after 
hitting driver related problems I got a few 
development/experimental drivers from ATI to try out.  Funny thing 
is that they eventually delivered one driver to me that worked, and 
I reported back to them about it, but all subsequent versions 
failed as before and none of the officially released drivers ever 
worked.  Go figure.  In the end I got fed up with peeing into the 
wind and just getting my feet wet, and bought an nvidia card so I 
could actually do some work.

Since then I moved the card to a backup workstation and have used 
the Xorg ATI radeon driver wit it, which while still not supporting 
the full OGL feature set, doesn't crash out X11/Xorg like the ATI 
drivers used to do.

With a laptop though, the option of changing your video card just 
isn't there and in any case it seems that there have been chip 
packaging problems with nvidia cards such that any that were made 
between roughly six months, to about two years ago, are quite 
likely to fail after a year or two (this has been quite well 
documented in some of the specialist IT press).

All in all, it sucks big time;  The nvidia drivers work pretty good 
but unless you've got the latest packaging the hardware is likely 
to fail, and ATI hardware, good as it seems to be, just doesn't 
have viable linux drivers.

You can either try the Xorg drivers, which may or may not support 
your particular vid chip, or trawl through all the forums of people 
trying to get the proprietary ATI drivers to work in the hope of 
getting lucky.  That the proprietary ATI drivers _can_ work is 
beyond doubt, but getting them to work on all systems still seems 
to be hit and miss, and will certainly need you to do a fair bit of 
work digging around in the innards of your Xorg config, along with 
sorting out conflicting OGL libraries.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

LeeE