"Last week we had published The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux, and to no real surprise, the feedback ranged from beliefs that it was propaganda to others being grateful that AMD finally shared some additional information with their Linux customers about the fglrx development cycle. While the article was far from being propaganda, what had outraged a number of open-source developers were AMD's comments on the R200 support or there the lack of. In this article, we have a few additional comments to share along with what some open-source developers had to say about AMD's information."
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Member since:2005-09-10
That is all so uber-weird. Apart from being forced to use fglrx on Linux system even for simple 2D, one practical consequence is that unaccelerated ATI hardware is painfully slow on for instance Opensolaris. Thanks for nothing ATI.
I bet there is a big fat palantir tuned in on Microsoft somewhere up the ATI Orthanc.
Member since:2005-07-06
I wonder what we can do about this. Sure, my next graphics card won't be an ATI, but I doubt that will have any (visible) impact. And I also doubt that the nVidia card I'm going to buy will be better supported with open source drivers than the (admittedly stinking cheap) ATI one I'm using now. I think I'll choose an Intel one for my next laptop, but again Intel isn't exactly a friend to free/open source software.
It would be nice if there were one authoritative "Linux hardware" site were people could check hardware compatibility and, more important, be guided through their choices. If there a very visible "At the present moment company XXX is the most friendly towards FLOSS, buy from them" sign things might change: some tens of thousand disgruntled customers leaving would surely be noticed by these guys.
Rehdon
Member since:
2006-09-08
They won't even let a 600 line 2d r500 ATI driver be released. That means you can't start up X on any Linux distro AFAIK.
http://airlied.livejournal.com/43975.html
http://airlied.livejournal.com/43520.html
http://airlied.livejournal.com/31180.html
"I wrote a driver for my X1300 card for 2D using that info and a VBE modesetting tool that trapped all the IO accesses. The code mod to the radeon driver is about 600 lines of actual code. I submitted this to ATI for release due to the NDAs I have with them. It is now > 4 months since I did this and I've heard nothing back from ATI apart from the initial interface."
That quote is from last year...