Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Catalyst 8.4 released - quick overview

Earlier to day AMD announced the release of the 8.47 driver under Catalyst 8.4. The main driver page can be found here , and the driver itself can be downloaded from here .

While I am without a HD 3x00 series card on hand to test with (Donations for or of one would be extremely appreciated), I do have several other ATi cards on hand.

To install the driver I used the script created by Yamal over on Mepislovers.org. His script can be located here on this thread.

No, I don't have a guide for this script yet... Anyways, first up was the x1900 All-in-Wonder. No problems with the install. Just ran the script, rebooted, and the driver worked.


The x1650 was a similar story, ran the script and the update went through fine.


The Radeon 9600 I have on hand was a different story. While the 8.43 driver in the Mepis repositories would load using the method described on the Mepis 7 upgrade Faq, it previously would only use the Mesa driver for support. The pre-compiled 8.45 driver also provided by Yamal was a similar story, the 8.45 driver would load, but would only use Mesa for acceleration.

Before installing the new driver I used Synaptic to remove all existing software found with fglrx, including the control panel. Then I ran Yamal's script, and forced the new driver with dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. The result? The 8.47 driver is running on a Radeon 9600.


A quick look at the screenshots also shows that the 9600 is running Control Panel 1.8, while the x1650 and x1900 cards are running Control Panel 1.6.

Currently when selecting the Fglrx control panel in the Mepis repositories, Mepis wants to install both the old fglrx-control package and the new fglrx-amdcccle package. However, Yamal's script creates a separate fglrx-amdcccle package in the sub folder along with the driver and kernel module. As shown with the 9600, users can install the deb produced by Yamal's install script without issue.

The other two cards I have on hand are an x1800 and an HD-2600. However, the x1800 is out of commission pending some replacement RAM (donations would be nice to buy some more RAM...)... and the HD-2600 is running Mepis 7 64bit... which Yamal's script does not work on.

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