New ATI Video Driver (10.1) for Linux Supports Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic)

Last evening, January 27th, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) announced a brand-new version of its versatile ATI Catalyst proprietary Display Driver for Linux users. ATI Catalyst 10.1 updates the software to version 8.69 and it introduces production support for the Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) operating system from Canonical. Available for both x86 and x86_64 architectures, ATI Catalyst 10.1 also fixes the following issues:

· X.Org no longer crashes on an Ubuntu 9.10 system, if multiple Xinerama-enabled X.Org server generations are executed;
· Switching between virtual desktops no longer breaks the operating system;
· Single mode is now shown properly in the "Display Manager Properties" tab of the ATI Catalyst Control Center, instead of multiple modes, if the "big desktop" mode is enabled;
· The system no longer crashes if an HDMI monitor is hot-plugged, or if the users toggle between HDMI and LCD;
· Fixed an issue on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 32-bit systems, when the "Detect Displays" button was selected in ATI Catalyst Control Center, and an HDMI display was hot-plugged.

However, lots of known issues remain unresolved for this release of the ATI Catalyst suite, especially for Ubuntu users!

Requirements:

· X.Org 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 or 7.4;
· Linux kernel 2.6 or higher;
· glibc version 2.2 or 2.3;
· Support for POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) is necessary for 3D programs;
· The following packages should be installed on your system: XFree86-Mesa-libGL, libstdc++, libgcc, XFree86-libs, fontconfig, freetype, zlib and gcc.

Also, please note that 64-bit users must have the 32-bit libraries installed before executing/updating the driver! Moreover, a GCC compiler, kernel-headers and kernel-source are required to build the modules and to enable 2D and 3D acceleration.

Supported operating systems:

· Red Hat Enterprise Linux;
· Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux;
· openSUSE Linux;
· Ubuntu Linux.

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5 Responses

  1. Psy[H[] says:

    Yep. But they broke deb packaging.
    fix here: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showpost.php?p=110091&postcount=56

  2. Vancouverite says:

    FYI: The ATI driver has some pretty serious problems that have not been solved. They persist with this new driver

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fglrx-installer/+bug/351186

    See comment 371 for the link to a work around that still includes a memory leak. Yes, this bug is actually that active.

    Van

  3. Jason says:

    Yeah…this is why I abandoned my ATI card and bought a NVidia a while back.

  4. Chris says:

    There is a new version, 10.2, available on their website today. Would be interested in how this new one works compared to 10.1

    http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx?type=2.4.2&product=2.4.2.3.32&lang=English

  5. Ivan says:

    Hi, I have been using ATI driver 10.2. I have been experiencing heavy memory leaks over time especially if OpenGL stuff gets activated.

    I even wrote mini OpenGL programs in 2009 consisting of the minimum OpenGL operations needed to be run. And tested it for memory leaks using valgrind. It seems that even just doing basic driver calls results in these memory leaks. As soon as the device is used there are memory leaks. I might be wrong since I do not have a lot of experience with openGL in ubuntu.

    10.2 in my opinion is faster and better, easier to use, but still has the serious memory leak and slowness with resizing windows, btw resizing windows is another way produce memory leaks for me at least. Enabling desktop effects result in heavy memory usage. This is not the case with my friend using a nvidia card.

    maybe its just me, but I still dont want to use the driver. Maybe I will go to nvidia then, it has been years now.

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