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GUI Graphics Software X

ATI To Support XFree86 4.3 Soon 31

Posted by timothy from the 4.3-is-a-rocker dept.
uninet writes "With ATI's recent offering of its first proprietary GNU/Linux drivers, we were interested to see if a follow-up driver was in store to provide compatibility with XFree86 4.3, which was released earlier this year. To find out what ATI was planning, we contact the Ontario-based company and had a conversation with their Manager of Developer Relations, Michael Smith."
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ATI To Support XFree86 4.3 Soon More

ATI To Support XFree86 4.3 Soon

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  • nVidia has already released drivers for FreeBSD, while ATI is just starting out. They claim weird reasons like non-manageability of code... but hasnt nVidia solved that outside of X? And they claim some specs secrets will be spilled out if they opensource the thing... I wonder if those secrets would be that obvious. They should really try to make more money off their hardware rather than selling information on howto operate their hardware.

  • But X won't support ATI, or NVidia or anything... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21, 2003 @04:27PM (#5775668)
    we were interested to see if a follow-up driver was in store to provide compatibility with XFree86 4.3

    But unfortunately, the XFree86 developers won't support hte new drivers for another year...

    Christ, I just upgraded to 4.3. The new 'nv' driver for my Nvidia MX 2 Card causes my monitor to go into suspend mode! The monitor never comes back on, even if I "ctrl-alt-backspace' or switch workspaces with 'ctrl-alt-1', or 'ctrl-alt-2', etc.

    I can still use the keyboard, so I can reboot my computer with 'init 6'; but I am typing without a monitor... typing blind.

    The 'nvidia' driver from NVidia seems to work fine so far. Thank god for a company that produces quality drivers.

    Of all the services I use on Linux, most were buggy a few years ago but seem to work pretty well now. XFree86 is the only product that has ALWAYS had problems...

    • The new 'nv' driver for my Nvidia MX 2 Card causes...

      Dude, you have an MX? No wonder you posted as AC, I'd be embarrassed too.

  • Hopefully ATI comes out with a Freebsd driver soon. Of course if it doesn't support all their radeon series cards it'll be useless to me. Who knows maybe the linux zealots will be shouting ATI instead of Nvidia now.

  • ATI's change in policy... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by geoswan ( 316494 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @04:48PM (#5775801) Journal
    Maybe the change in policy is related to changes in management? The founder and President of ATI was involved in some kind of scandal recently.

    Hmm. Google isn't helping today. My vague recollection was allegations of insider trading...

    • Re:ATI's change in policy... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Papineau ( 527159 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @08:02PM (#5777222) Homepage

      He (M. Yu) and 3 or 4 other execs plus wives/husbands were charged with insider trading for the sale/gift of a few millions worth of stock mere days before "desastrous" quarterly numbers which sent the stock down in 2001, hence getting more money/larger deductions. The Ontario Securities Commission is investigating the case.

      Can't find a link either in 2 minutes.

  • I was just at ATI's driver site Sunday (well, and Saturday, and Friday, and Thursday...) looking for a driver supporting X 4.3.

    Vendetta [guildsoftware.com] looks a lot better with the ATI binary driver and maybe Racer [racer.nl] will crash less with it.

  • Any XFree86 4.3 Support Good (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @06:53PM (#5776698) Homepage Journal

    I'm really glad to hear that ATI will be supporting XFree86 4.3.

    Actually, I'm glad to hear that anyone will be supporting XFree86 4.3.

    • Given the recent Keith Packard comments and flap over the future governance of XFree86 and
    • given that X is the bedrock underlying graphical interface to all kinds of UNIX flavors,
    • given that X development is rapidly moving into more insignificant minor rev levels preceded with ever more dots (X11 6.5.1 - No! Wait! X11 6.6 has been out 2 years and I didn't even notice! We'll be at X12 any day now!),
    it's encouraging that someone with commercial interests finds it important to support XFree86 on their hardware.

  • GNU/Linux Open Source (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hubertf ( 124995 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @07:32PM (#5777022) Homepage Journal
    Let's hope they don't support only Linux (probably via some binary module, as nVidia does), but really open up their drivers. Preferably in a way that can be used on non-PC, non-Linux too.

    - Hubert (not speaking for The NetBSD Project :)
    • Preferably in a way that can be used on non-PC, non-Linux too.

      You can already use it on non-Linux. The design of XFree86 means that drivers can be interchanged among any OS for the same CPU. Thus a Linux/x86 XFree86 driver will work fine on *BSD/x86, and even in theory with XFree86 on OS/2 as well. Of course, it's no substitute for a proper open source driver that can then be ported to other non-PC architectures.

  • Right now, on my FreeBSD laptop running XFree86 4.3, I'm using a driver (trident.o) compiled with linux's XFree86 4.2. I found video playback on the new driver was a bit erratic, so I copied the old one from my linux partition over to my freebsd partition, and it works perfectly.

    I believe this is how XFree86 4 is meant to work: binary drivers stay compatible, even across different OS's (as long as it's the same platofrm). Yet in the interview there's a question "What about Debian"? Why wouldn't it work -

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