Petition ATI: Demand better drivers!

11-15-2004	#1 (permalink)
sarumont Content Team Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: /dev/urandom Posts: 3,682	Petition ATI: Demand better drivers! I'm sure many of you running laptops with ATI cards or the latest and greatest AIW have the common problems. If you can get your ATI card working, it runs like a GeForce2MX. Drivers for the TV Tuner? Hell no. Drivers for my mobile card? Dream on, sucka. Make a difference: petition ATI for better Linux drivers. This site is a start: http://www.petitiononline.com/atipet/ There are just over 19000 signatures already. Even if you don't run an ATI card, you should help out. If you feel that this isn't enough, email ATI directly. Eventually they'll have to turn their ears to the Linux communities pleas for support. Nvidia did and they have excellent 3D support under Linux. I've used both Nvidia and ATI cards personally. My ATI card (AIW9600) is sluggish running Neverwinter Nights; my GeForce4 Ti4600 ran it flawlessly under the same settings (max visual effects). The Ti4600 was new in Q1-2002. The AIW9600? Q1-2003 with newer tech and twice the RAM. An email including this type of information from users across the Linux community is sure to get the attention of the suits at ATI. __________________ "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so." ~Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

11-15-2004	#2 (permalink)
Dolda2000 Linux Guru Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Täby, Sweden Posts: 7,578	This came as a surprise to me. I thought ATi had good Linux drivers. However, I haven't used an ATi card since I tried a Radeon 7500 about a year ago, for which they had no driver at all, and the open source driver didn't have TV Output support. The really funny thing is that I contacted ATi to get some programming specs for the card so that I could add the TV-Out support myself. They did indeed give specifications for me, but they explicitly lacked all information on TV-Out, even though that was the exact thing I had requested. That was when I gave up and got a GeForce 5200FX. In either case, I thought that the drivers they had for newer cards were indeed good. Now that I know that's not the case, I'll certainly at least sign the petition.

11-22-2004	#3 (permalink)
benjamin20 Linux User Join Date: Oct 2004 Location: jacksonville beach FL Posts: 299	gforce 5200fx oh ya __________________ nVidia G-Force 6600GT (bfg) pci-e: amd 64 2000+ (939): 1024 corsair ram: 2X 80gb seagate harddisk SATA: plextor cd/dvd-read/write cdrom SATA

11-22-2004	#4 (permalink)
loft306 Linux Guru Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: The DairyLand Posts: 1,666	Heh i think i put up this same petition a while back.....noticed it when i sighed this one... __________________ ~Mike ~~~ Forum Rules Testing? What's that? If it compiles, it is good, if it boots up, it is perfect. ~ Linus Torvalds http://loft306.org

11-23-2004	#5 (permalink)
variant Linux Engineer Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Dublin, Ireland Posts: 1,271	I would rather pettition them to fully open the specs of the cards they produce in conjunction with any third party hardware vendors that they use. __________________ Proud to be a GNU/Gentoo Linux user!

11-23-2004

#6 (permalink)

Super Moderantor

Join Date: Aug 2004

Location: Texas

Posts: 9,269

Quote:

Originally Posted by variant

I would rather pettition them to fully open the specs of the cards they produce in conjunction with any third party hardware vendors that they use.

Good luck with that.

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Registered Linux user #270181
TechieMoe's Tech Rants

12-06-2004	#7 (permalink)
robak Linux Newbie Join Date: Jan 2004 Posts: 136	i hope ATI gets moving now and writes drivers that work stable __________________ make install not love Registered Linux user number 369245

12-16-2004	#8 (permalink)
smindinvern Linux Enthusiast Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Rockin' in the USA!!! Posts: 603	They also need support for the TV features, I've done everything short of writing a custom driver to get those to work, with no success

12-16-2004

#9 (permalink)

Linux Engineer

Join Date: Jul 2003

Location: England

Posts: 1,219

Re: Petition ATI: Demand better drivers!

Quote:

Originally Posted by sarumont

Drivers for the TV Tuner? Hell no.

What about the GATOS drivers for ATI tv cards i know they dont support all features but they work? And my ATI mobile worked fine under Linux.

12-22-2004	#10 (permalink)
predatorx Just Joined! Join Date: Dec 2004 Posts: 1	The Gatos project is a work in progress and is designed for xfree. So no official x.org support last time I checked. I have a dual head radeon pro and the last crappy 3.14 drivers give a blurred second screen when using dual head. I checked that in forums: just another Ati crap driver problem: it works on XFree 4.3. So I had to change distro to get that done in a decent way (hail gentoo). So after years! still no 64 bit driver ??!!!? They are idiots. Nvidia has it working since the early CPU's on both Linux and Window$. Ati does not even have a driver for that, while claiming to support Linux. Seems to me they have stopped in time and lack consumers wishes. I'll never buy an Ati card again, that's for sure. FYI: The suse 9.1 Xfree 4.3.99 (or something) also gives a second screen blur, seems to be a wrong version. Signed the partion, hope it will help others.