ATI's Radeon Linux drivers no longer supported?

SuperBug writes "After viewing the previous story on Slashdot about the Radeon 9800 vs GF FX 5900, I checked out ATI's web-site which seems to have been re-designed relatively recently. It seems strikingly similar to nVidia's site regarding the driver selections. I thought "great, ths should be much better to find my drivers now. At least a little simpler." To my surprise. I found this message for Linux Graphics Drivers "Not Supported". Thinking this had to be a mistake, I took a look at the "Discontinued Products" list under the customer care link and lo and behold. Just about every recent card is there. I just wanna know, what gives?"

Maybe....

[Graemee]

The guy who wrote them got hit by a bus and they didn't find the source code.

Easy! Buy a FireGL card..

[Rinikusu]

All of their FireGL cards still seem to "be supported", so just fork out the additional $600 or so and grab one of them. :)

or maybe...

[hatrisc]

the thought of sco made them curl up in a little ball and hide in a corner.

Might as well go for the obvious...

[Raul654]

...before someone else does.

CONSPIRACY! I say conspiracy! Microsoft is paying ATI to cut off support for the linux drivers. They secretly made a large cash payment in a bag with a big '$' on it, probably made the drop somewhere in Daily plaza. This is their new strategy -- paying blood-money to other companies to get them to cut off support for our beloved linux. It's world-wide, dammit! Why won't anyone believe me?

Re:Maybe....

[TopShelf]

That damn bus is dangerous - always seems to wipe out the one guy who can resolve a sticky situation. How come it never hits the PHB's?

Darl's gone an' done it! It's time to learn 'im!

[teamhasnoi]

Ah's getten a lynch mob 'gether! Who's with me?

We'll git dat dag-gummed, low-lying varmint, wipe dat grin offen his pie-hole, an' string 'im up fer the bears ta' git 'im!

Com'on, boys! We'll learn 'im good!

Re:Maybe....

[Anonymous Coward]

or maybe he got in the way of Steve Balmer dancing..

Cheaters!

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems strikingly similar to nVidia's site

Yeah, I guess ATI needed to keep up with those cheaters at ATI.

I found the new ATI site to be riddled with optimized gifs and using stylesheets for positioning that stops working if you go "off the rail" with another browser.

Re:Is that an official distribution?

[blixel]

but for many people, "drivers that some guy built" just don't cut it

I guess you don't use Linux at all then eh?

Re:Maybe....

[hesiod]

> How come it never hits the PHB's

'cuz they're never in the office, or they have good enough parking spaces to hop in their SUVs before going anywhere near a bus.

Re:This article is all wrong

[botzi]

Lastly, why don't slashdot editors do some sort of background checking. What are they being paid for?

What do you mean by "they're being paid for??".... Like they're really getting paid???? Geeezee..... That's better than school...no seriously... I mean, in the classroom you make typos=>you got punished(low mark, bullet in the head, whatever), here(/.) you make typos you got paid.....;oPPPPP

The real question is...

[emo boy]

Will 3dfx's Voodoo2 12MB be able to run Half-Life 2? That's all I'm wondering...

Re:Maybe....

[BorgDrone]

How come it never hits the PHB's?
They do, only you never hear about it because no one really cares what happens to PHB's

Re:Is that an official distribution?

[paulhar]

Maybe a gal wrote them? Would that be ok?

Re:This article is all wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

exactly what do the slashdot editors do all day?

Moderate people down who disagree with them, of course.

Re:vendor asshats

[mofochickamo]

It sucks when a vendor won't consider supporting their products in OSes that don't have massive market share...

Welcome to my world.

Steve Jobs.

Video cards are for lamers anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

A 3270 is all you need, maybe a 3279 if you are a graphics professional ... freggin' Win/Mac/Linux lamers and their fancy color graphics and games.

and you say they got the xbox2?

[creslinux]

Call me suspicious but ati get the xbox2 contract and then stops with the linux drivers - CONSPIRACY - ;-)

Re:Darl's gone an' done it! It's time to learn 'im

[lobsterGun]

How come every time someone wants to get a lynch mob together the assume the voice of a redneck.

I would think that lynch would have a much wider appeal. Mulholland Dr., Lost Highway, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet I mean COME ON ! Those are classics.

Re:Maybe....

[slide-rule]

That damn bus is dangerous - always seems to wipe out the one guy who can resolve a sticky situation. How come it never hits the PHB's?

Who exactly do you think drives the bus? ;-)

Darl MacBride comments :

[borgdows]

"They have pulled off Linux support at our request.
If they had continued to offer Linux support, we would have sued them for IP infringement about using Linux to develop drivers for the illegal Linux platform."

Re:possible answers?

[mahdi13]

WOW! That is a great FAQ!

Looks just like the one they put up last Fall!
Oh wait...it is!

Re:NVidia vs. ATI

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Just grab the GLX and Kernel [4363 is latest] tar.gz's. Unpack them, export IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH=true. go into the Kernel directory, make, go into the GLX directory, make, go into /etc/X11, edit XF86CONFIG-4 [e.g. remove dri, etc.. replace nv with nvidia], add nvidia to your /etc/modules now either reboot or isnmod nvidia and launch startx. Boom NVIDIA drivers.

That is exactly why I bought OSX. ;)

Re:Maybe....

[jazman_777]

That damn bus is dangerous - always seems to wipe out the one guy who can resolve a sticky situation. How come it never hits the PHB's?

It does, but they're interchangeable, so they're replaced without you noticing.

Re:Maybe....

[mdielmann]

How come it never hits the PHB's?

First, they'd have to leave their ivory tower...

Re:Radeon is supported by XFree86 team

[paranode]

From the ATI Linux FAQ:

"ATI actively assists qualified 3rd party Linux developers writing software for the majority of ATI products by providing them with development kits and information. We have also made every attempt to provide hardware 2D acceleration for all shipping products and will continue to assist XFree86 developers with their work."

Re:This article is all wrong

[aardvarkjoe]

I think you made a typo:

i think, and think, and keep on thinking, but i still can't figure out why

Microsoft is so popular other than momentum .. saying the quality is sub-par is a gross understatement.

See, now it's just the rantings of a good little slashdrone.

Re:possible answers?

[blinder]

Heh, something interesting, on page 5 of that PDF, they list FreeBSD as a linux distribution.

Does that mean we need to mod this PDF as -1 Troll?

Re:Radeon is supported by XFree86 team

[i_am_nitrogen]

This is just a myth. Talk to somebody in #XFree86 on irc.freenode.net. I know of at least one person who has access to specs on just about every ATI card under NDA, but he's free to write an Open Source driver. No, the XFree86 drivers suck because, well, in the words of many others (I'm just paraphrasing here), "Some (not all) of the developers are incompetent morons who wouldn't know an mmap() from a direct read() on /dev/mem."

Re:possible answers?

[Monkelectric]

As a university SysAdmin, we had a couple computers with ATI "all in wonder" cards. Students needed to be able to do video capture for their research. Long story short, in 98 the ATI drivers crashed the machine non-stop. The Win2k drivers were a little better -- but every 2 months or so, the drivers would just *quit*. The machine wouldn't capture. The first time it happened, I furiously worked on the machine, reinstalled drivers, manually deleted them and their reg keys, did a PNP reset ... NOTHING did any good. The only thing that fixed the card was reinstalling the OS! *and THAT* only lasted another 2 months until the drivers gave up again! It got to the point where the students would walk up to me and say "It happened again", and after that, they stopped even bothering me, and they just reinstalled 2k themselves!

Would you like to start a ATI hate group together ?

Duties of a Slashdot Editor

[The Famous Brett Wat]

You said:

...why don't slashdot editors do some sort of background checking. What are they being paid for?

They get paid to select the stuff from the submissions bin that goes on the front page. No, wait -- that's done by a squadron of stealth monkeys. Um, maybe the editors feed the monkeys?

Mod Up ^

[dnoyeb]

Parent should get points for using the term "irony" in a sentence.

Re:vendor asshats

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that you meant a chicken-AND-the-egg problem. That's question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. I have no clue what a chicken-IN-the egg problem is.

Re:Might as well go for the obvious...

[Anonymous Coward]

try again. still need subject/verb agreement. perhaps "conspiracies claim you" or "conspiracy claims you"

Re:possible answers?

[rsax]

Heh, something interesting, on page 5 of that PDF, they list FreeBSD as a linux distribution.

That explains it then. I was going through this "FreeBSD" project's site and I noticed that they have something called a ports collection which makes installing software really easy. I should have known if it was just another linux distro, they probably just copied Gentoo's portage system.

Re:Darl MacBride comments :

[Anonymous Coward]

Luckily, he forgot he had a claim on the hardware as well since it's a derivative work ;-)

Minor nitpick

[Rogerborg]

>term used VERY loosely

I've been reading Slashdot for quite some time, and I'm pretty sure that's spelled "losely".