ATI's Linux drivers do not totally suck, shock

ATI HAS astonished me with the quality of its Linux drivers. Given ATI's past record of not caring about Linux users, I was shocked by the almost typing-free installation experience.

I remember the agony and hair-pulling exercise of dealing with video drivers under Linux. That's why I made a habit of installing proprietary drivers like SNAP for Linux from Scitech software. But even Snap's own software relied on a crude text-mode installer - at least last time I tried it. Call it the button-clicking Windows disease, or OS/2 for that matter, or my creeping lack of patience, but I'm increasingly expecting graphical installers whenever possible.

Following Fudo's short description of ATI's Linux drivers earlier this year, I had "test ATI's linux drivers" in my "to do" list for months. Finally after his recent news update, I crossed my fingers and fearing the worst, decided to see what ATI has been doing lately in Linuxland.

Good news: ATI is keeping Linux drivers up to date

Well, I'm stunned by how well everything went on my Gateway 7422 Athlon 64 system which features an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 with 64MB of video on board. The install was performed on top of Blag Linux which itself is built on top of Fedora Core 3, and which uses X.Org version 6.8.2 for its video subsystem.

ATI's graphical linux installer

I won't go in this story into any benchmarks or feature testing, just describe the end user experience. To make a long story short, I think " AMD TI" should be praised for the work it has done with the GUI installer. First, the journey started by going to ATI's support page on the web. I clicked on "Notebooks with ATI graphics" expecting the usual "contact your notebook manufacturer" or "we do not provide Linux drivers" curse that was once the usual reply.

Choosing modules to install. Click-friendly.

There I found ATI's video drivers, and fairly recent ones, dated Sep-20-06. You can select between 32 and 64 bit editions matching your linux kernel. Then "AMDTI" offers each edition in three packages: "for Xfree86 v4.0", "for X.Org 6.8.x" -each 10.7 MB, and finally one huge fifty five megabytes - yes 55MB - monster dubbed "ATI Driver Installer". In other words, this one can be translated as "video drivers for the clueless average non-geek end-user who likely doesn't know his/her Linux version uses X.Org, Xfree86, or a hole in the ground".

An English language, human readable error message!

Instead of downloading the X.Org edition which matches my Linux distro of choice, I went with the dumb road and downloaded the "ATI Driver installer", an aptly named ".run" file. When you run it, a graphical dialog pops up: "you must run this as super-user". Impressive indeed. I changed to root -su in linuxspeak- and tried again. ATI's installer detected I was running X.Org, and the graphical installer showed up, asking install modes - custom or default - and which modules I wanted installed -OpenGL, etcetera. Five clicks later and after some file copying the drivers installation completed successfully, asking me to reboot.

Installation complete! Well... almost!

Room for improvement
Still, there is room for improvement, as the GUI installer ends with the note "It is important to save your X Window configuration file, and then run aticonfig (in a console window) to complete the configuration of the display settings".

What? Run from a "console window"? Why? The GUI installer is already running as root, why can't it "save my X Window configuration file"? Why should I manually open "a console window" - by the way it's labelled "Terminal - Command line" in my linux flavour, the fact that some geek coders can't agree on the name to give the command line speaks volumes. Please, call the command line "command line".

But wait, there's more. Running "aticonfig" from a "console window" -command line window- alone does nothing. You must actually type "aticonfig "initial" input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf". When you run aticonfig with no arguments that procedure is 'kindly' explained. But why should I have to read that babbling and type it manually in the first place?

I did the aticonfig dance and it saved the old X11 configuration and I was told to reboot. I did. At the end of the Blag boot process the screen flickered a bit as the drivers apparently changed to each possible video mode for a few seconds, and finally the Gnome desktop appeared in full colour glory, and in the right 1280x800 wide-screen WXGA resolution that seemed to give every other linux distro the fits, to boot.

Under the Gnome/Blag "Applications" launcher there was a new "ATI Control" icon. Well done indeed. Launching it brings as expected the ATI control panel. A very basic one indeed. It does little more than show you your graphics chipset info, the drivers version number, and let you select the primary monitor, or adjust the monitor's gamma correction settings.

ATI's Linux control panel.
Why that ugly tiny font, oh why?
Has the company ever heard of the concept of anti-aliasing?

ATI's Linux control panel looks really ugly with some very tiny text, in what looks like bit mapped fonts with no antialiasing. Come on ATI, I bet the company can do better!.

In short: the good news is that ATI is keeping Linux drivers up to date. And that you don't need to be a total geek or know about X.org or Xfree86 to download and install the drivers. The bad news is that there's still a final step that needs to be done from the command line, and that ATI's control panel still looks unnecessarily awful. ?

See Also
ATI releases Catalyst 6.9 for Win and Linux
ATI slammed for lack of Linux support
ATI readies big Linux drive push
Intel to cut Linux out of the content market
Intel Viiv is stupid and broken

L'INQ
Intel's VIIV: Victory of What??"
Scitech Software's SNAP - universal video drivers for Linux