Three Cheers for ATI

[peckinpah]

Just installed the latest ATI Linux driver 8.35.5 released a few days ago. I'm pretty impressed so far. Install was a breeze, as easy as with the NVidia driver. No black screens.

 

And my biggest gripe has been fixed, which was blurry, muddy-looking fonts on my notebook's 15.4" screen. Previous drivers always gave be problems with that. Now finally I have clear readable type. I admit I have not tried any 3D stuff yet, but considering some of their previous drivers, this is a huge step forward just to be able to install them in under 5 minutes and actually have them work.

 

I encourage people who might have given up on ATI to try these drivers and see what you think. BTW, I downloaded the driver to my desktop and then installed from init 3 in command line.

 

EDIT: I tried the new driver on my desktop system with an X800 Pro, and it pretty much hosed it. The X-Server won't start and when I type in the command to uninstall the ATI driver, it says "file not found". Oh well, maybe half a cheer for ATI.

 

I guess I will be reinstalling Mandriva this weekend. Sorry for the enthusiasm, it was all a terrible mistake.

 

EDIT #2: So I reinstalled Mandriva, but I this time installed both kernel source and libstd++5 first, since I saw an error message saying something about the installer being unable to find libstd. This time it worked, and I have a working ATI Catalyst Control Center applet. However, when I try to run "glxgears" it does not work, so there may still be a problem somewhere.

 

EDIT #3: I installed UT 2003 on the X800 system. Game would not run due to an open GL error. So there is definitely a problem. Out of fairness, I should also mention that the notebook on which I installed the ATI driver successfully is running SUSE 10.2 not Mandriva. Sorry if my advice caused anyone to wreck their system, though it does not appear that this thread is generating much interest anyway.

Edited April 2, 2007 by peckinpah