Little annoyances still bug AMD's Mobility linux drivers

AMD has been improving its linux video drivers for its ATI products lately. However, Mobility Radeon linux drivers still show the same annoyances I found back in September. The company promises developments.

I was positively impressed when I wrote the article titled "ATI's linux drivers do not totally suck, shocker". However, I found a few annoyances, for instance the ATI control panel applet had text in a tiny, hard to read font. Fixing that should be a no-brainer.

ATI control panel in 8.29 mobility Radeon Linux drivers

When I heard, thanks to our guru Fudo, about new driver releases, I headed to AMD's ATI support site, clicked on Drivers, Linux, ATI Mobility Radeon, and the chipset of my Gateway 7422GX notebook - ATI Mob. Radeon 9600. I downloaded the latest release and installed it on top of my previously installed version, which was the October release numbered 8.29.06. I was not pleased to find that nothing changed with regards to the control panel applet between 8.29.06 and 8.32.05.

ATI control panel in 8.32

The little annoyances, starting with the ugly tiny unreadable fonts in the "ATI control Panel" applet are still there, as you can see in the two screen shots. Plus, I found another annoyance... the control panel applet lacks "single instance" detection. So, if you click a dozen times on the "ATI Control Centre" icon, you get a dozen separate Control Panel applets running at the same time. This is ugly, and learning about single instance detection is a first-year programming exercise.

Half a dozen instances of the control panel applet running side by side, and eating memory. BZZT Wrong!

By mid-January, I forwarded my comments to one exec at AMD, and was promised "We'll be talking more about our drivers at the end of this month…watch this space". Well, January ended and no, on the 31st night, the Mobility Radeon drivers page still shows 8.32.05 as the latest version. Come on, AMD, we know you can fix the applet. We're still listening, and so should you. Should we hear anything other than deafening silence, we'll let you know. µ

See also

ATI's new Linux drivers already support R600
AMD releases the last Catalyst driver of 2006
DAAMIT releases Catalyst 6.11
ATI releases Catalyst 6.10
ATI releases Catalyst 6.9 for Win and Linux