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Official ATi Fglrx Driver
for : Mepis 6.5 / 6.04 betas by : je.saist Radeon X.org - 6.5 | Official Fglrx - 6.5 This guide will walk you through installing the official ATi driver into Mepis Linux 6.5 and the 6.04 beta versions. Now, there are several reasons why you would want to run the Official ATi Driver. The first is speed. In older Quake 3 engine games the Official ATi driver is over twice as fast as the Radeon driver from X.org. In Unreal Tournament 2004 the Official ATi driver is over 460% faster on average than the Radeon Xorg driver. In Quake4 engine games, the ATi driver is also around 450% faster on average. The official drivers will also let you run Cedega. The second is hardware support. The Radeon Xorg driver only supports R100, R200, R300, and R400 products. R500 and R600 products are not supported. For reference, R500 products are the Radeon x1x00 series, and the R600 product line-up is x2x00 series. The third reason is Avivo, which allows you to accelerate video playback on x1x00 series cards. So why would you not want to run the Official Fglrx driver? Well, if you care about your drivers being Open Sourced, that is a sticking point. But, the only practical reason is that in order for Beryl or Compiz to work, you would need to install Novell/Suse's XGL X server. The Radeon Xorg Drivers allow you to accelerate Beryl and Compiz within X.org. This guide is different than previous versions of the ATi installation guide. We won't be entering Synaptic, and we won't be getting the Fglrx Control panel. We'll just be using the Mepis X-Windows Assistant. 1: Start by Left Clicking on System  2: Left Click on Mepis  3: Left Click on Mepis X-Windows Assistant  4: Enter your /root password, then left click on OK  5: If you are running from one of the Live CD's, this is where you will now find the XConfig repair utility. But, we are not interested in that right now. Left Click on the tab that is labled ATi.  6: Here we are, our current driver set as vesa (xorg)  7: Left Click on fglrx (official 3D)  8: With fglrx (official 3D) dotted, Left Click on Apply.  9: Mepis will now toss up a warning. As discussed at the beginning of this Guide, this isn't accurate by any stretch of the immagination. I'm not sure where the 10% is pulled from, on average the Official Driver is 100%-500% faster. However, it is accurate that Beryl support is not native. You would need to be running XGL in order to support Beryl. Left Click on Yes.  10: Mepis may take a few minutes, in the background it will run scripts to update the Apt-Repositories and pull the current driver for us. Eventually, we'll get message the driver has been changed. Left Click on OK  11: Go ahead and Close the X-Windows Assistant.  12: And reboot.  Having tested on a 9600 Pro, 9600 SE, 9800 Pro, x1600 Pro, x1800, and an x1950, the system never blank screened once on reboot. Take me back to the Guides. |