AMD Catalyst 12.9 For Linux Brings Few Good Changes

[bridgman]

At first glance it sounds as if the driver might be configured to support only the embedded SKUs.

[fritzls]

Not recognize because the driver is not being loaded.

Still this error..

"..
fglrx_drv.so: undefined symbol: noXFree86DRIExtension
..."

Xorg/kernel not suported.

[remjg]

What about Gnome Shell support ? Are there still some rendering issues ?

Today, I was installing Ubuntu 12.04 on friend willing to switch to linux (he didn't burn the restauration disk of windows and wouldn't pay 60 € for shipping after his HDD died).

I didn't dare to install the catalyst driver since the free driver was working well... That's how bad amd/ati's reputation is ! Anyway, we begin to have good free drivers since amd/ati releases gpu specifications, so everything is not so bad ;-)

[Rigaldo]

What about Gnome Shell support ? Are there still some rendering issues ?

Today, I was installing Ubuntu 12.04 on friend willing to switch to linux (he didn't burn the restauration disk of windows and wouldn't pay 60 € for shipping after his HDD died).

I didn't dare to install the catalyst driver since the free driver was working well... That's how bad amd/ati's reputation is ! Anyway, we begin to have good free drivers since amd/ati releases gpu specifications, so everything is not so bad ;-)

Hmm .. Just so you know, with Chakra Linux you can use the proprietary drivers on live mode too. So you can have an idea whether and how they work
(^ if this interests you or anyone else here)
I like their approach on their drivers in general I'd say(they have proprietary latest drivers for all cards in their repos, both catalyst and catalyst legacy and have a version of xorg that ensures all cards can work fine with the proprietary drivers, so not much digging for all that. Oh, and auto-detect on live boot for non-free drivers["Boot with non-free drivers" option]).
Hope more distros implement similar aproaches.

[remjg]

Hmm .. Just so you know, with Chakra Linux you can use the proprietary drivers on live mode too. So you can have an idea whether and how they work

I didn't know Chakra Linux but it's not relevant to me since it's using KDE.

I used to install the proprietary driver from the live CD and try it. But on Ubuntu 12.04 live, after installing the proprietary driver and gnome shell, there is no easy way (graphical way) to log out in order to try gnome shell.

[Rigaldo]

I didn't know Chakra Linux but it's not relevant to me since it's using KDE.

I used to install the proprietary driver from the live CD and try it. But on Ubuntu 12.04 live, after installing the proprietary driver and gnome shell, there is no easy way (graphical way) to log out in order to try gnome shell.

I have HD 6470M on my laptop that I currently use, with Catalyst 12.8 driver on Ubuntu 12.04 (downloaded this 12.9 too, but I'd rather wait for the "real" one, as this seems to not be a final version ..). Gnome shell(3.4.1), Unity (5.16.0) and KDE (4.9.0, through Kubuntu Backports ppa) seem to not have much(if any significant) problems with it .. It's more than usable ..
I occasionally had some suspend/resume problems, but I seem to have had the same ones on Windows OEM install I used to have and on the new "not so legit" one, so I can't blame Catalyst(not the Linux version at least, if both Windows and Linux have it xD ..).

If this helps you ..
I haven't had as much of a bad experience with Catalyst as I'd expect from what I've heard .. But certainly not as good as it could be or what I hear it could be from others with NVIDIA(my limited testing on my older NVIDIA laptop agrees ...). And I did need a couple tweaks to use correct power management and have low temps .. But now it's probably better than on the default Windows install there was ..

I didn't have the best experience with the open driver .. Mostly power management(and overheating ..) .. But at least didn't have some glitches that I had with Catalyst(no lags on Gnome Shell or excessive CPU usage and overheating, which was fixed in Catalyst 12.6 I think, but cairo-dock still flickers and stuff on OpenGL mode with Catalyst .. xD )

Actually instead of straight Ubuntu I had installed Ultimate Edition 3.4, but it's basically Ubuntu 12.04 with a ton of ppa's, programs, themes and tweaks .. And I pretty much reverted it to basic Ubuntu and purged most ppa's(later added my own though ..) at some point(didn't want to reinstall ..). I've done some testing on others though as well.

That's pretty much my feedback with Catalyst. I've used it on Arch Linux(at the state updates were January to July), Ubuntu( 12.04 ), Chakra ( updated from July onwards ), Fedora ( 17 ) and probably a couple other I forgot already ... But I should say that only on Ubuntu I could get power usage to be how it should be.
And KDE is pretty nice, the most complete DE in my opinion (just uses 100-200 megs more ram than some lighter ones and starts a bit slower.. no flaw I can find othen than that). Don't shun it like that .. :P

[fritzls]

The good news fom other side. Is that the PRIME in quantal+xorgedgers ppa is working well in AMD open source drivers.

[remjg]

Thank you for your feedback Rigaldo ! So you're telling me that Catalyst from 12.6 should be fine (no glitches/artefacts with gnome shell)... The thing is that I think that I can't use it on HD3000 or HD4000 hardware anymore from this release. I've broken my system so many times in the past using fglrx that I'm scared to try it anymore :-D

And KDE is pretty nice, the most complete DE in my opinion (just uses 100-200 megs more ram than some lighter ones and starts a bit slower.. no flaw I can find othen than that). Don't shun it like that .. :P

Actually, I've tried KDE yesterday for the first time in almost 8 years : I can confirm that it's a beautiful desktop environment, clean and polished with great apps. Anyway, I'v always liked the gnome philosophy and even if the KDE environment used to be more complete, I never changed my mind ;-)

[DaemonFC]

At first glance it sounds as if the driver might be configured to support only the embedded SKUs.

It works with my RadeonHD 5670. It gave me the unsupported hardware watermark, but I got rid of that.

[DaemonFC]

Seems to work better than 12.8 did under kwin with direct rendering. The animations are much smoother.