Re: [Flightgear-devel] ATI vs. Linux
Andy Ross wrote: Probably most of you noticed last week that ATI has released a unified linux driver package for all of their 8x00/9x00 cards. [...] Wohoo, you made it into /. with this article. I would not wonder if this boosts FlightGear popularity :-) Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] ATI vs. Linux
Martin Spott wrote: Andy Ross wrote: Probably most of you noticed last week that ATI has released a unified linux driver package for all of their 8x00/9x00 cards. [...] Wohoo, you made it into /. with this article. I would not wonder if this boosts FlightGear popularity :-) Yikes. My wife saw this first* and called me in this morning. Good grief. I hadn't planned on using up my 15 minutes of fame so soon, nor for such a silly purpose. * Yes, I have a wife who reads slashdot. Phear me! No wait, this is a post to flightgear-devel. Never mind. :) I was hoping to see some interest in FlightGear in all the responses, but most of it was the standard slashdot nonsense**. Curt will have to tell us if he sees any new mailing list subscriptions. The statistics at http://seneca.me.umn.edu show a little peak over the past few days and about 6000 hits on the slashdot link, but not a whole lot of change. ** Linux vs. Windows (no! FreeDOS!). NVidia vs. ATI (no! Matrox!). More than a few people called me an idiot. More than a few of those hadn't bothered to read the link. Whee. But let it not be said that all was in vain. I just received the following from Terry Makedon at ATI. These guys understood the problem and fixed it withing a day after the slashdot article appeared. It looks like it really was just an honest mistake. Now I feel guilty for the frothing mess remark. :) Andy Hi there, Last week we posted a set of unified Linux drivers. These drivers were only loading up on Built by ATI cards. Through our various feedback mechanisms we have determined that there is a large community of Powered by ATI Linux users that did not benefit from our Linux drivers. At this point we are happy to announce an update to our Linux driver (ver. 2.5.1) which will work on both Powered by and Built by. ATI's driver and software strategy is firmly based on responsiveness and we greatly appreciate the feedback our Linux users have provided. Please use http://apps.ati.com/linuxDfeedback/ for a direct feedback line to ATI. Thanks again for the feedback, Terry Makedon Sr. Product Manager - Software ATI Technologies -- Andrew J. RossNextBus Information Systems Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nextbus.com Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one. - Sting (misquoted) ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] ATI vs. Linux
I had to chuckle at the line Through our various feedback mechanisms... It's nice (?) to see that something like /. is considered a feedback mechanism. ) On Friday, November 29, 2002, at 03:12 PM, Andy Ross wrote: Martin Spott wrote: Andy Ross wrote: Probably most of you noticed last week that ATI has released a unified linux driver package for all of their 8x00/9x00 cards. [...] Wohoo, you made it into /. with this article. I would not wonder if this boosts FlightGear popularity :-) Yikes. My wife saw this first* and called me in this morning. Good grief. I hadn't planned on using up my 15 minutes of fame so soon, nor for such a silly purpose. * Yes, I have a wife who reads slashdot. Phear me! No wait, this is a post to flightgear-devel. Never mind. :) I was hoping to see some interest in FlightGear in all the responses, but most of it was the standard slashdot nonsense**. Curt will have to tell us if he sees any new mailing list subscriptions. The statistics at http://seneca.me.umn.edu show a little peak over the past few days and about 6000 hits on the slashdot link, but not a whole lot of change. ** Linux vs. Windows (no! FreeDOS!). NVidia vs. ATI (no! Matrox!). More than a few people called me an idiot. More than a few of those hadn't bothered to read the link. Whee. But let it not be said that all was in vain. I just received the following from Terry Makedon at ATI. These guys understood the problem and fixed it withing a day after the slashdot article appeared. It looks like it really was just an honest mistake. Now I feel guilty for the frothing mess remark. :) Andy Hi there, Last week we posted a set of unified Linux drivers. These drivers were only loading up on Built by ATI cards. Through our various feedback mechanisms we have determined that there is a large community of Powered by ATI Linux users that did not benefit from our Linux drivers. At this point we are happy to announce an update to our Linux driver (ver. 2.5.1) which will work on both Powered by and Built by. ATI's driver and software strategy is firmly based on responsiveness and we greatly appreciate the feedback our Linux users have provided. Please use http://apps.ati.com/linuxDfeedback/ for a direct feedback line to ATI. Thanks again for the feedback, Terry Makedon Sr. Product Manager - Software ATI Technologies -- Andrew J. RossNextBus Information Systems Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nextbus.com Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one. - Sting (misquoted) ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] ATI vs. Linux
Andy Ross writes: ** Linux vs. Windows (no! FreeDOS!). NVidia vs. ATI (no! Matrox!). More than a few people called me an idiot. More than a few of those hadn't bothered to read the link. Whee. That's very impressive for SlashDot. I wish that only a *few* people had called me an idiot when I submitted the Blender Fund story. Bloody favouritism, that's what I call it. All the best, David -- David Megginson, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.megginson.com/ ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] ATI vs. Linux
* [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Andy Ross) [2002.11.29 15:14]:
Martin Spott wrote:
Andy Ross wrote:
Probably most of you noticed last week that ATI has released a unified
linux driver package for all of their 8x00/9x00 cards. [...]
Wohoo, you made it into /. with this article. I would not wonder if this
boosts FlightGear popularity :-)
Judging by ATI's reply, you might be able to make Slashback too. :-)
I was hoping to see some interest in FlightGear in all the responses,
but most of it was the standard slashdot nonsense**. Curt will have
to tell us if he sees any new mailing list subscriptions. The
statistics at http://seneca.me.umn.edu show a little peak over the
past few days and about 6000 hits on the slashdot link, but not a
whole lot of change.
Unfortunately(?), we got a /. post on a holiday, so we will not get the
response that we might have otherwise. It's good for Curt since we
didn't /. UMN's network, but for the project bad from a PR standpoint.
As for the mailing list subscriptions, we've had about 7 individuals
subscribe to various lists over the past two days. We normally have
about 1 or two people a day (I'm considering hacking up a perl script to
make a graph of it right now...hmm...).
We are a pretty popular spam target though. I usually delete 5+ spams a
day that are caught for not being list members. Actually, one day a few
weeks ago, someone put us on their massive spam mailing list or
something. We received nearly 200 messages in one day, many of which
were people replying to the list saying STOP THIS SHTUFF! It's all in
/dev/null if anyone wants to read it later. :-)
--
Cameron Moore
/(bb|[^b]{2})/
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Re: [Flightgear-devel] ATI vs. Linux
On Friday 29 November 2002 4:54 pm, David Megginson wrote: Andy Ross writes: ** Linux vs. Windows (no! FreeDOS!). NVidia vs. ATI (no! Matrox!). More than a few people called me an idiot. More than a few of those hadn't bothered to read the link. Whee. That's very impressive for SlashDot. I wish that only a *few* people had called me an idiot when I submitted the Blender Fund story. Bloody favouritism, that's what I call it. All the best, David Thats what you get for being Canadian ;-D ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
[Flightgear-devel] ATI vs. Linux
Probably most of you noticed last week that ATI has released a unified linux driver package for all of their 8x00/9x00 cards. I've been wanting to try one of these for a long time, but have been a little scared of the DRI drivers which are still maturing. This was a good excuse to buy a cheap ($70) Radeon 8500LE and try it. The short report is that it works and seems to run FlightGear very well, but I wouldn't recommend buying one purely for their Linux drivers. Stay with NVidia for now. Continue reading for the story of compatibility hell. Background: ATI's business model differs from NVidia in that they manufacture and market their own circuit boards, not just the graphics chips. Mostly. They actually *do* sell the chips to OEMs, who market third party Radeon-compatible boards. In their marketing parlance, their own boards are Built by ATI, while third parties sell Powered by ATI hardware. Most of the low end mail order cards are of this type; ATI's hardware seems to be sold mostly off of store shelves. In practice, this doesn't make much difference. While some OEMs might skimp on parts or use cheap memory, most don't, and the hardware is 100% software compatible. ATI's windows drivers have always worked equally well for OEM hardware and Built by ATI cards. Except their Linux drivers. For reasons unknown, the recently released drivers do an explicit check to see that they are running on built by hardware, and exit if they find a powered by card. Guess which one I bought? Not that I could tell -- I ordered a ATI Radeon 8500LE 64MB card from a mail order vendor. There is no information in the distribution channel to indicate what you are getting. Nor is there any documentation on ATI's site that the linux drivers only work on pure hardware. So I'm SOL. ATI clearly says on their website that Radeon 8500's are supported, but in reality most Radeon 8500 cards are *not* supported. Someone lied to me. But nothing is ever unfixable. Remember that the hardware really is software compatible (the DRI drivers and Windows drivers don't care what they are running on). It turns out that the OEMness of the card is stored in the PCI subsystem ID, and that value is defined in the card's BIOS code. And the BIOS can be flashed. So I'm off to the realm of the hardware modder and overclocker. It turns out that utilities are available to put a retail BIOS into an OEM card, which will defeat the stupid version check. I found one at http://www.xcl-clan.com/ -- woo hoo. Except that it's a DOS program. Remember that I'm a Linux guy. I have no DOS, nor FAT partition, nor even a floppy drive in this machine. So after a few hours finding and burning a FreeDOS CD and figuring out how to get a ramdisk working, I'm golden. The card has new BIOS, and it works, and the steam coming out of my ears hadn't yet caused any major burns. Yay. Apparently some people enjoy this stuff... In summary: unless you are 100% sure that your card is a built by variant (which basically means that you have to have purchased it in a dark red ATI box at a retail store), are happy with gray market stuff like BIOS reflashing, or absolutely *must* have one of the super-high-end super-expensive 9700 cards (for which no alternatives exist), stay away from Radeon cards for Linux. The technical decision to cut off perfectly working hardware is pure idiocy, and the marketing scheme that makes it impossible for a consumer to tell the difference between supported and unsupported products is downright dishonest. It's not that the drivers themselves are poor quality, or that I think ATI is actually trying to abuse its customers. But this driver release is just not good. Between them, the ATI marketing, engineering and manufacturing people have turned a fairly standard software release into a bloody, frothing mess. Give them another release to fix the release stupidities (or at least document their hardware limitations) and hopefully things will get better. And the competition isn't even close, anyway. Except at the very high end, the NVidia hardware and drivers are just as fast, just as cheap, and (most importantly) just work. I'm going to give the DRI stuff a whirl tonight. It lacks a lot of the fancier hardware features (programmable shaders), but FlightGear doesn't use them anyway. After last night's experience, I'd honestly give up 10-20% in performance to not have to use the ATI dreck. Andy -- Andrew J. RossNextBus Information Systems Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nextbus.com Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one. - Sting (misquoted) ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
