OpenSUSE and ATI Radeon X1300 Play nice together

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 15:03:50 GMT

If you are the proud owner of an X1300 and have installed the latest OpenSUSE you have probably figured out that you are finally able to install the Radeon drivers simply by running the wizard, running ATICONFIG --INITIAL and the mod probing the FGLRX object. The previous Radeon driver combined with SUSE 10.1 would not install correctly. It wasn't until yesterday that I figured out why my windows looked corrupt and the window wasn't drawing correctly. It had something to do with permissions I believe because when I logged in as root, the desktop rendered for a long time.

Case and point, Linux desktop is a whole lot of fun. But, I've tried the bleeding edge, and older of many a distro and there are very few that will even install at all if you have the Radeon x1300 (perhaps a lot more Radeons as well?). I'd like to personally thank Novel's SUSE team and ATI's Linux team for getting this to work right with minimal configuration. I have been trying to get teh proprietary driver to work for over 2 months with very little sucess.

I tried using Compiz and Beryl as my window managers and I can't get this to work right yet. I can get Beryl as the manager, but I loose either Window focus on each window or my keyboard as I can't type anything anywhere besides the new Novel Kmenu. Also, each window doesn't have decorations, and once you open you can't minimize. I don't know whether to be happy that I can now view Linux in 1440x900 instead of the MESA driven 1024-768 environment that I've been stuck in, or keep pushing ahead to try and get beryl running so perhaps I could impress my friends enough to get them into Linux.

A few links: openSUSE 10.2 Product Highlights , openSUSE 10.2 Release Notes , Download openSUSE 10.2 via Bittorrent

openSUSE 10.2 Desktop Effects: Compiz , Using XGL on SUSE Linux , How to install Beryl with XGL, AIGLX on openSUSE 10.2

Some Screenies: OpenSUSE 10.2

Kickoff menu (KDE)

GNOME Slab Menu (I prefer KDE)

Software Patterns (Pragmatic way to group the software packages in a way that important packages are easily exposed, I am a big fan)

Compiz (moving from one desktop to another)

Beryl (better than compiz in many regards)

I will post some videos if/when I get beryl and Compiz running correctly, this is the closest I've gotten to it and I did have some problems getting this to run when following Novel Suse's instructions. Thanks a lot to ATI and SUSE for such a great job. In my opinion this is the best distro out right now, you could say Ubuntu, but it doesn't have nearly the hardware compatibility out of the box that OpenSUSE has, and they are trying to get these guys from Novel to join the Ubuntu team from what I hear, also, Ubuntu is looking for a hardware certification and driver guy to get that build to install as smooth as OpenSUSE 10.2. Advice: If you are currently running 10.1, 10.2 is much better and less buggy so I can highly recommend it.

Geek Speaker: Linux

OpenSUSE and ATI Radeon X1300 Play nice together