Note to self - ATI binary drivers installation
Sunday, 13. August 2006, 00:57:58
file temp
temp: ASCII English text, with very long lines
After some kind of little smile that took my lips to some delicate movement, I opened the file and found a set of instructions I had done a few weeks ago when updating the ATI video drivers. It's merely a dump of this page, but I still want it here... you never know when something like that can come handy
ATI video drivers
SUSE Linux 10.1 ships with the newly revamped open source radeon driver. That may be fine for 2D rendering, but it doesn't do direct rendering for 3D graphics. To get hardware 3D acceleration (and for XGL support), you still need the proprietary ATI fglrx driver.
Go to the ATI Web site, click on Drivers & Software, then Linux Display Drivers and Software, then on the driver appropriate to your video card. 32-bit SUSE installations need the x86 drivers, and 64-bit SUSE needs the x86_64 versions. After you have clicked the link for your card, yet another link comes up. Click it, scroll down to the downloads table, then right-click the ATI Driver Installer download link and save it to your home directory. You do not need to download any of the other packages.
After the file transfer completes, close all open programs, then press ctrl-alt-F1 to switch to the first virtual terminal. You'll see a text-mode login prompt; log in as root. When you're at the command prompt, type in this command:init 3
You'll see a bunch of text scroll by, and then a message saying that runlevel 3 has been reached. Press Enter to get the command prompt back, then change directories (cd /home/username)to go to the one you downloaded the driver
Be sure to substitute "username" with your user name, in the above example. Now you need to change the ATI installer permissions so that it can be run from the command line.
For long file names, you don't have to type the whole name into a terminal window. Instead, just type the first few letters and then press the Tab key, and the file name will be automatically completed for you. This is useful in situations like the one you're in now, where there is a long and complex file name to type in. So type the following command into your terminal, and use the Tab key to complete the ATI driver file name, then press Enter to execute the command:chmod +x ./ati-driver
That will make the program executable; this must be done before you can run it. Now it's time to run the installer. Again, use tab completion instead of typing the name in. You have to add the ./ before the filename to tell the terminal program that the file you are referring to is in the current directory. If you don't specify that, the terminal will look in other places for the file. It sounds crazy, yes, but that's the way GNU/Linux is (and Unix before it). For the below example, the entire file name is typed in. Please note that this may not be the same file name that you downloaded -- it is only an example. You should use tab completion when you type this command in so that you don't accidentally mis-type the long file name. The part of the example that will not change is the switch statement after the file name (the part with the dashes). Here's the example command for the ATI driver installer for a 32-bit system:./ati-driver-installer-8.24.8-x86.run --buildpkg SuSE/SUSE101-IA32
And for a 64-bit system:
./ati-driver-installer-8.24.8-x86_64.run --buildpkg SuSE/SUSE101-AMD64
After a few dozen lines of text, a driver package will be created. Go ahead and run it with the following command (the first example is for 32-bit systems):rpm -ivh fglrx_6_9_0_SUSE101-8.24.8-1.i386.rpm
And for 64-bit systems:
rpm -ivh fglrx64_6_9_0_SUSE101-8.24.8-1.x86_64.rpm
Update your system environment variables with this command:ldconfig
Next, you need to tell SUSE that you want to use this driver instead of the standard one:aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf
Lastly, you have to tell YaST which driver to load (that's a zero in the example, not a letter):sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx
Now reboot your computer by typing the following command:reboot
The next time your system starts, you'll have hardware 3D video acceleration. Please note that every time you update your kernel, you must re-install the ATI video driver.
Thanks to Jem Matzan!!
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