On Sun, 2010-01-17 at 21:44 +0000, Lucian @ lastdot.org wrote:

Recently I've done a bad bad thing, buying a laptop with an ATI card.

I have a less-than-ideal but so-far working setup with Centos 5 on this computer which has a Radeon x1950 card in it.

When I first set this machine up I put Fedora 10 on it and it "just worked". But I changed it over to Centos 5 a couple of months ago and have found that drivers that come with Centos 5 don't support this card properly; "man radeon" doesn't list it as a supported card; it was listed as supported by Fedora 10. It works with the vesa driver, but not at the 1680x1050 resolution that my monitor uses.

I reluctantly downloaded and installed ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run

Now my monitor runs at 1680x1050 like it should. It's my understanding that the 3d stuff doesn't work completely right because I seem to have a strange mix of SGI, ATI and Mesa listed when I run glxinfo, but since I don't do 3d stuff it really doesn't bother me. 3d does actually work,anyway, because glxgears runs and gives me about 2030fps, so I don't know if I'm actually missing out on anything.

I'm kind of hoping that a Centos update will come around that supports my Radeon x1950 card natively so I can get away from the ATI proprietary junk that I seem to be stuck with at the moment.