New Drivers and BIOS Plans for ATI Graphics Cards
It was good news across the board for ATI graphics card owners with AMD deciding to go for a free driver and immediately delivering the goods. Now the proprietary Linux driver, Fglrx 8.42.3, has been released, and it promises various improvements.
The new ATI graphics driver supports Compiz, Beryl and Compiz Fusion with or without XGL. The driver has new code for AIGLX support. It uses the X.org server up to version 1.4. Thanks to the TexturedVideo playback feature Fglrx 8.42.3 is said to have vastly improved video support on top of generally improved performance.
But there’s one thing the driver can’t do: it doesn’t support the current 2.6.23 Linux kernel, although an update promises to close the gap. The current release is available for the R300 through R600 series cards, but doesn’t support ATI’s FireGL models. The driver installer and release notes for Fglrx 8.42.3 are available for downloading from the ATI support pages.
Developer Oliver McFadden published plans hack the ATI graphics card BIOS in his blog: “I've been thinking about doing some reverse engineering of AtomBIOS, the BIOS used on newer Radeon cards; R500, R600, etc. Ultimately I'd like to create a free software (GPL) replacement BIOS for at least one Radeon card .” The aim is to improve ATI card performance on Linux. If he’s successful, McFadden will be releasing the BIOS under the GPL.
Issue 14: Raspberry Pi Handbook/Special Editions
Tag Cloud
News
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SCO Rises from the Swamp
Longtime litigator revives an ancient suit against IBM alleging Linux infringes on Unix copyrights.
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UberStudent Project Releases UberStudent 3.0
Specialty distro keeps the focus on advanced learning.
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openSUSE Conference Approaches
The openSUSE Conference will be held July 18-22, 2013, at the Olympic Museum in Thessaloniki, Greece.
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Drupal.org Hacked
Security breached at home sites of the CMS project.
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Oracle Takes Action on Java Security
Lead Java developer vows policy changes and more attention to fixing problems.
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Google and NASA Partner in Quantum Computing Project
Vendor D-Wave scores big with a sale to NASA's Quantum Intelligence Lab.
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Mageia Project Announces Mageia 3 Linux
Many package updates and Steam integration highlight the latest from the Mandriva-based community Linux.
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FSF Outs the World Wide Web Consortium over DRM Proposal
Richard Stallman calls for the W3C to remain independent of vendor interests.
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Debian 7.0 Debuts
The new release supports nine architectures, 73 human languages, and zero non-Free components.
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Alpha Version of Fedora 19 Released
Fedora developers release the first alpha version of Fedora 19, known as Schrödinger’s Cat, for general testing. The final release is expected in July 2013.