[olug] ATI Radeon 9000 Pro and XFree86 4.2.0

[Jon H. Larsen]

I purchased a Sapphire ATI Radeon 9000 Pro card the other day from 
Newegg to replace my Radeon 7000 in my main box. (The 7000 is going into 
the PVR project - more about that at the next OLUG meeting)

RH8 comes with XFree86 4.2.0, which does not recognize the chip id of the 
Radeon 9000 (and I am assuming the 9500 and 9700 as well).  Checking some 
mailing lists, I was able to find out that if you used the CVS version of 
XFree86 from October onward, you should be able to get it to work.

The other option was to download the ATI supplied binary drivers.  I 
wanted to stay away from that option, only because I don't want to add 
another piece to XFree to get it to work (partly why I'm not using the 
NVidia-based cards, some minor, but annoying issues).

I have, on occasion, used CVS versions of a few programs, but I've been 
patient enough to wait.  Luckily, the latest development version of 
XFree86, 4.2.99 is out and available and suppose the newer Radeon chips.  
The Rawhide branch of Red Hat has a source RPM available.  So, I set about 
building the source RPM before I left for work yesterday.

When I got home, I found the build went fine, no problems.  When I went 
about installing, some dependencies (three) were a little off.  They were 
very minor deps, and I was able to deal with them.  

After the install, X worked fine again, even a tad faster having been 
compiled on my box.

The only snags I have run into has been the XFT version of Mozilla, and 
KDE apps don't display fonts properly, which is probably due to the a 
dep on fonts.  The only KDE app I use is KMail anyway, so it's not a show 
stopper (once again, Pine to the rescue). I'm going to do a new build of 
mozilla tomorrow and see if I can get that straightened out.

I thought I would commit this info to the list in case someone else 
encounters a similar problem.

Jon L.


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 [ Jon H. Larsen  - email: relayer at omahadirect dot net         ]
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