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AMD fglrx, fgrlx-legacy : news, cleanup & important informations

March 3rd, 2013 by

Status of fgrlx & fglrx-legacy regarding next coming 12.3

fglrx

fglrx (Catalyst 13.1) drivers has been refreshed and published for 12.3 with the RC2 build.
During the first few days after the release, and fresh new build will be made with the final version, and first updates.

fglrx-legacy

fglrx-legacy (Catalyst 13.1) will never support (actually) xorg 1.13 which is the version that come in openSUSE 12.3. Even if it can handle kernel 3.8
So the previous build has been removed from the server. To insure end-users no trouble or hassle trying to get it working.
If you still have a radeon from hd2xxx to hd4xxx you’re welcomed to use the free radeon. It made progress and could eventually be as efficient as the proprietary drivers.
The bonus you get, you can report bug, and they will be fixable.

Status of mirrors

One year ago I announced the move to the new host for the package mirror. During that time, I’ve kept a redirection active, and also a symlink from ati to amd-fglrx

This time is over now, so please update your repositories

Repositories available

FLGRX

http://geeko.ioda.net/mirror/amd-fglrx/ add openSUSE_(you version) from 11.2 to 12.3

FLGRX-LEGACY

http://geeko.ioda.net/mirror/amd-fglrx-legacy/ add openSUSE_(you version) from 11.2 to 12.2

Spread the word

If I already updated the en.opensuse.org wiki page (even if the reviewing process is stuck actually), I need your help to spread the word, to reach any end-users that need those informations.

Notice about tumbleweed, evergreen

I saw several users, trying to use the one-click-installer with tumbleweed. Sorry this can’t work due to the lack of perfect recognition of tumbleweed. etc/SuSE-release is 12.2 actually.

So if you use tumbleweed you just have to install the tumbleweed repository (again one for fglrx, one for fgrlx-legacy depending on your gpu)

But beware, tumbleweed is a moving target, and the proprio drivers could stop working at any update, kernel or xorg

Evergreen : some users successfully use fglrx-legacy 13.1 with the kernel 3.0.58

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7 Responses to “AMD fglrx, fgrlx-legacy : news, cleanup & important informations”

  1. Hi !!

    Sharing in the spanish forums!!

    Thank’s!!

  2. hi !!!

    in french dans le texte

    https://www.alionet.org/content.php?425-Statut-de-fgrlx-fglrx-legacy-concernant-la-12-3-%E0-venir

    Thank’s!!

  3. vrm

    I have updated xorg to 1.14 ( with mesa 9.1) from the xorg repo. The 12.3 version doesn’t exist so had to use factory. Also updated to 3.8.3 from kernel stable. So far, things appear stable.

    Performance slightly improved over stock 12.3. I have radeon 4250. What I have noticed is that catalyst driver, even with highest powersave setting ( least performance) vastly outperforms the OSS radeon driver at the highest performance setting ! Not to mention, the OSS version doesn’t seem to detect the 128M of (dedicated?) sideport memory that the vendor calls “display cache”.

    It seems that the ‘proprietary’ driver use is no longer an option (unless something changes such as unufied EGL in the future).

    • Depending on integrator work the result of AMD legacy chipset is varying a lot 🙁

      I’ve absolutely no clue about the future of legacy against new xorg version ( wonder to know how Ubuntu will handle that for Mir 🙂 )

  4. Thomas

    Major rant ahead 🙂

    It’s a shame that flgrx-legacy is not supported anymore (or the other way around legacy does not support the latest Xorg). It was unfortunately the only reliable driver for my notebook.

    The trouble with the Open Source radeon driver is that it randomly crashes the system during and after video playback. The screen simply turns blank and nothing is responsive anymore. The radeon driver used to work reliably about 2 years ago. But that’s the way Open Source software development works. Progress means introducing new problems. The same with the touchpad driver that doesn’t work anymore since my upgrade to OpenSUSE 12.3 and also screen brightness cannot be controlled anymore (used to work OK in previous versions).

    I exclusively use OpenSUSE for my every day needs since 2004. Every major upgrade of OpenSUSE brought problems that more or less fade away over the course of a whole year due to maintenance updates. Things that used to work on the same device suddenly glitch or break completely. Graphics, touchpad, WLAN connectivity, standby mode and so on.

    In some instances I’d love to send bug reports. Trouble is that the KDE built-in bug report facilities always fail with different excuses and most of the time it crashes for itself and there is no bug report function for the bug report function.

    And nope, I rarely feel like jumping through the hoops of going online to all these relevant bug tracking places for all these various projects, trying to think of what I actually did when that happened.

    The problem with the fglrx-legacy incompatibility is that I am forced to either downgrade back to OpenSUSE 12.2 (which has its own set of quirks) or switch distributions and pick one with an older Xorg version. No real solution in long terms. My 4 years old trusted notebook is all of a sudden rendered almost unusable because of progress.