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Radeon Xorg Driver.
for : Mepis 6.5 / 6.04 betas by : je.saist Official Fglrx - 6.5 | X.org Radeon - 6.5 This guide will walk you through installing the X.org Radeon driver into Mepis Linux 6.5 and the 6.04 beta versions. So why would you want to run the X.org driver? Well, for starters, it is an open source driver, and work is being done on R100 and R200 products (Radeon, Radeon 7x00, and Radeon 8500). ATi has never supported Radeon or Radeon 7500, and dropped Radeon 8500 series support in August of 2006. This means that the X.org Radeon driver is the only acceleration available for users of original Radeon and Radeon 7000 series products. With no legacy driver release from ATi, the X.org driver may be the only driver for Radeon 8500 series users in future kernel versions. The second advantage to the X.org Radeon driver is that it natively supports Beryl and Compiz under X.org. You don't need to be running Novell/Suse XGL for acceleration. So, why would you NOT want to run the Radeon X.org driver. The first reason 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, something the X.org Radeon driver has issues with. The second is hardware support. The Radeon Xorg driver only supports up to 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. So, if you have a recent ATi card, or you were planning on getting an x2x00 series card, you'll be out of luck with the X.org driver. The third reason is Avivo, which accelerates video playback on x1x00 series cards. There is no support for Avivo within the X.org Radeon Driver. As in the Official Fglrx guide, we'll just be using the X-Windows assistant. This guide however, also shows how to remove an existing Fglrx driver. This should be useful to Mepis users with Radeon 8500, 9000, 9100, and 9200 series ATi cards. 1: Start by Left Clicking on System  2: Left Click on Mepis  3: Left Click on Mepis X-Windows Assistant  4: Enter you /root password and then Left Click on OK.  5: Left Click on the tab labled ATi.  6a: If you are installing the Radeon (xorg) driver on a new installation, you'll have something like the following screen, where vesa (xorg) is dotted.  6b: If you already have the official ATi driver installed, fglrx will probably be dotted.  7: Left Click on radeon (xorg)  8: With radeon (xorg) dotted, Left Click on Apply  9: If you were using the fglrx driver, there will be a message to remove the fglrx driver.  10: Left Click on Yes  11: Mepis will now run a script to update the Apt-Repositories and install the x.org Radeon driver. Eventually a message will pop up that the driver has been changed. Left Click on OK  12: Close the X-Windows Assistant  AT13: And reboot.  Take me back to the Guides. |