Radeon drivers in Mandrake 10.0

[Avalanche 0]

Hi all.

I just installed Mandrake 10.0 and I really like it so far. Much faster and more stable than any other Mandrake distro I've ever used, and easier to work with than Fedora or RH9.x

 

Anyway, I have a bit of a question, that I'm not sure is fixable right now, but I thought I'd put it out there anyway. I can't get the newest ATI Proprietary Radeon drivers to install.

 

I took a screenshot of the the error it gives me so you all can see what is going on. I went to the ATI Help section on their site, and it appears the problem may simply be due to the "newness" of Madrake 10. So below is a show of what it tells me. Any advice?

 

 

Thanks for any help!

[danleff 0]

It looks like the kernel source code and headers need to be installed for the kernel version on Mandrake 10.

 

what kernel is running?

 

Type uname -r in a console and see if it is kernel 2.6.x or 2.4.x.

 

You then need to install the kernel source and header rpm packages from the install cd, if they are not already installed.

 

Did you see the following link;

 

http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4475.html

 

Quote:

The ATI driver package includes a few bundled versions of this kernel module to work with most systems. If your system matches one of these configurations, then a pre-packaged kernel module should be installed for you and the information below should not be necessary.

 

However, if your system does not match any of these configurations, then the installer will try to build a custom module for you from scratch. This process will require the following software to be installed:

Kernel source code

Kernel header (include) files

GCC compiler

Make Utility

 

It also looks like you will need to make the symbolic link to the kernel, as mentioned in the article, if it is not there after you install the kernel header and source rpm files.

 

Look under the section: Creating a symbolic link /usr/src/linux

[Avalanche 0]

Well I just thought I'd finally follow up on this here.

 

Just tonight, I finally got the ATI Proprietary driver installed.

 

It was one of those "stupid problems." All I had to do was install the kernel source off the install cd, and then run the driver install second. It went perfectly.

 

This was the first time I've had to configure X by command line though, that was a bit intimi[censored] I must say, but I just kept all the mouse and monitor settings the same as they were in the original config file (used harddrake to find the settings), and it went smooth as silk.

 

When it was finished, I hit CTRL-ALT-Backspace to restart X, and there I was with fully functioning OpenGL. Very nice, and performance is pretty good too.

 

Now if I could just get fonts in OO.o to look halfways decent...

[danleff 0]

Take a look at the following post on OpenOffice fonts. Since you have some experience with the command line now!

 

http://www.mail-archive.com/newbie@linux-mandrake.com/msg113252.html

[Avalanche 0]

Thanks for the link.

 

I'm kinda curious, this isn't a real support question, but why do you suppose the fonts in OO.o look much better with the default mandrake drivers for my video card than they do with the ATi ones?

 

The site helped a lot, except a I think it's kinda crappy that some of the fonts in OO.o look terrible no matter what you do. The default Times font for example is blocky and ugly, and no amount of anti-aliasing fixes it. I suppose I can't expect the world, for the capabilities of the software, concidering its price, it's phenominal.

 

Anyway, thanks for all the help!

[blackpage 0]

hi there,

 

I was a bit distracted by the way some fonts looked in some applications under MDK10. After some playing and fooling around I (sort of accidentally) stumbled across the "gnome-config"-tool.

 

I didn't think the influence of the settings there would affect the looks of my GUI much (KDE-user), but the gnome-conf-tool proofed otherwise. Maybe you check that out and divert into the "Fonts" section and have a look at the advanced settings. In my case fonts have been set to be smoothed "Black $ White" (hence no font-aa at all). So maybe this is worth a try.

 

On a sidenote: Some other GTK-based proggies (e.g. Scintilla/SciTE) can be improved muchly by putting an exclamation mark in front of the font name. Rumour has it the font-display is "piped" through "Pango" this way.

 

hope this helps

[blackpage 0]

addendum @OO-fonts ...

 

gidday, just had some maintenance to do and booted into the standard MDK10 configuration as it is installed "out of the box" (original kernel 2.6.3, KDE 3.2 etc.). To my surprise the appearance of OOffice and fonts therein is much worse than in my usual environment >> compiled Kernel 2.6.5, compiled KDE 3.2.1, compiled Qt 3.3.latest. To be precise: OOWrite looks more like Xemacs As a quickshot I'd "blame" the lib-paths (which point to the newly compiled libs/binaries first in the std-working-env) for being responsible for the improved font-rendering. Might peek into that matter over the weekend to maybe find out what causes this improvement.

 

cu