Wednesday, 20 May 2009

Howto enable ATI unsupported cards in Jaunty with full effets

The latest open source git drivers seem to have a lot of this fixed. While I'm sure you can wait until the next release when we get newer drivers, here is how to do this in Jaunty and get your system fixed now. Worst case scenario of doing this is that on your particular card all the cleanup hasn't been done yet, but on my x1200 this worked wonderfully.

Open up a terminal and run the following commands

sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libtool pkg-config git-core

sudo apt-get install libdrm-dev x11proto-gl-dev mesa-common-dev xutils-dev x11proto-xf86dri-dev x11proto-fonts-dev x11proto-randr-dev x11proto-video-dev x11proto-xext-dev x11proto-xinerama-dev x11proto-render-dev xserver-xorg-dev

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati

cd xf86-video-ati

sudo ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --enable-dri

sudo make

sudo make install

Now restart your machine and you're using the new drivers. Try bumping up your visual effects to max and see what happens. If you're lucky like me, everything will work flawlessly. If not, then you may want to wait a couple weeks and try it again, but you're no worse off then you were before.

16 comments:

TheHosh said...

hi, does this still cause flickering on 3D objects when Compiz Fusion is enabled?
thx

Michael said...

hey, do the open source drivers support the mobility hd 3670 card?

Fintan said...

Hello and thank you, you say only ubuntu. Does thzis work for Kubuntu as well? I have a ATI 9250 Pro card.

TekMate said...

Will this work on the powerpc architecture?

James E. LaBarre said...

When you say "unsupported" cards, you don't specify if that means older cards (such as the Radeon 7500 in my company laptop), or newer cards that ATI hasn't gotten around to adding support for yet. As I'm stuck with this old clunker for the forseeable future, having a decent driver could be very helpful.

David Cuadrado said...

I did the same thing, but I use AccelMethod "EXA", it does work better for me.

Bill Stanley said...

I get unmet dependency errors on Jaunty here:

Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libdrm-dev: Depends: libdrm2 (= 2.4.5-0ubuntu4) but 2.4.9-1ubuntu1~xup~1 is to be installed
Depends: libdrm-intel1 (= 2.4.5-0ubuntu4) but 2.4.9-1ubuntu1~xup~1 is to be installed
E: Broken packages
I apt-get updated before trying to install and have all repos enabled. Maybe they will fix this soon.

vin said...

I haven't tried it yet but if it works I'll stick with Jaunty instead of downgrading to intrepid bec. of the ati card X1100. It would be nice to know how to reverse changes if it messes up Xorg after restart just in case ...

doog said...

nice and worked like a charm. Got an unsupported ATI Radeon 200M and my system CPU usage dropped probably about 10% with the new OSS Xorg driver. glxgears shows around 400 FPS and the system is snappier. Granted, the fglrx driver shows about 1200 FPS on Hardy but hey, we don't have the option of running fglrx on anything newer.

Thanks for posting the exact instructions. It worked great and helped too.

Bliss said...

Hello,

Many thanks for the instructions.
Well I have a x1250 Mobility card, and though the unpleasant flickering has disappeared and display seems more stable, the CPU is overloaded... As a consequence, the CPU ventilator is simply blowing all the time. So I'll still stick to Intepid Ibex using the propietary driver for now.
Ah, my laptop is an HP 6715b, with a x1250 card, 2GB RAM and a Turion x2 TL-58.

Cheers

Chris

Edward said...

This did not work for me. How can I undo it?

I followed all the steps,in the post. Now I get a login screen, but one I log in my screen is simply a multi colored mess. Any ideas as to how I can fix this?

I reverted to my previous xorg.conf which I had saved before hand, and changed the driver from ati to radeon in xorg.conf, but I get the same thing. I have limited access to the desktop via Xnest (keeps crashing/being killed, every few minutes)
I tried Menu-->system-->preferences-->display while in Xnest but an error came up that Xrandr is not present.

Any ideas anyone?

emk

PS I have

Edward said...

Update: I changed the color depth from 24 to 16 in xorg.conf and it now works. However I still have no compiz special effects. So I do want to go back to the stock Jaunty drivers since I can get 24 bit depth with those.

PS I have a radeon mobility 7500. Which I understand is no longer supported by ATI. Computer is a thinkpad T30.

emk

Erich said...

This seems to have worked for me (x1200 Ubuntu 9.04). I no longer have the flicker issue. Hopefully, this will also allow me to play Sim 3 in wine.

Kevin Lewi said...

This fix worked for me until I decided to use Update Manager to patch "xserver-xorg-video-intel" on July 11th. For some reason, this made it so that when I tried to log in after restarting jaunty, the screen kept flashing without ever showing a login screen.

mazuhefa said...

i love ubuntu os.. hehe.. im a newbe here..

julio said...

running this:

sudo ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --enable-dri

I get this:
configure.ac:35: error: xorg-macros version 1.3 or higher is required but 1.2.2 found

Sysiphus again...