Skip to main content
Home

Fedora 7: Kernel 2.6.23 + ATI fglrx 8.42

Kernel 2.6.23 and ATI's proprietary fglrx driver 8.42 were released a few days ago, and you may have been tempted to rush out and upgrade. In one word, don't.

Although the display driver finally has AIGLX support and improved performance, it has no built-in support for the new kernel. It will mostly work, but you'll find that some programs will not start from the KDE or Gnome menu, although they'll start from the command line. So far, the culprit programs on my system are GoogleEarth, OpenOffice.org, and Mplayer. And I'm sure there are more.

For now, the most stable Kernel+ATI driver combination for me is 2.6.22_91 and ati-x11-drv 8.41 from the freshrpms testing repository. You can probably also use the one from livna.

Hopefully, when Fedora 8 ships in a few days time with the new kernel (2.6.23), it will come bundled with a compatible open source ATI driver. Or, maybe the ATI driver 8.43 will have been released, hopefully with support for the new kernel. It's probably better to wait for a few days to see what the situation is with Fedora 8, before upgrading the kernel and display driver.

Update — Jan. 16, 2008. I've finally updated to Fedora 8, and can confirm that both the bundled open source ATI display driver (xorg-x11-drv-ati) and the proprietary driver from livna repository (xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.443.1-1.7.12.lvn8) work. However, I found that for GoogleEarth to work with the open source driver, I had to apply this fix. I also had to undo the fix to get GE working with the livna driver.

Don't expect praise without envy until you're dead

— Joan Rivers

View

Reclaim your computer!

A personal computer is called a personal computer because it's yours. Anything that runs on that computer, you should have control over.
— Andrew Moss, Microsoft's senior director of technical policy, 2005

The most serious impediment to a lasting archive is the evolution of media, platforms, formats, and the applications that create them. Unique, proprietary, and constantly evolving data formats such as Acrobat-4, MPEG-4, Oracle 8, Quicken 2001, Real G2, and Word 2000 suggest or even guarantee obsolescence.
— Gordon Bell, Senior Researcher in Microsoft's Media Presence Research Group.

LIMITATION ON AND EXCLUSION OF DAMAGES. You can recover from Microsoft and its suppliers only direct damages up to the amount you paid for the software. You cannot recover any other damages, including consequential, lost profits, special, indirect or incidental damages.
— Clause 26 of the Windows 7 License.

Moodle Resources

Open source web conference systems

Premium Drupal Themes by Adaptivethemes