So SUSE/Novell really came through, taking advantage of AMD’s recently released specs to provide us with a new open source driver. It’s still fresh out the gates, so don’t expect a bulletproof or even fully working driver. Thanks and credits go to a few wonderful developers like libv, egbert and emmes.
For more news on this release, go here.
This really is wonderful news. Not even the “95% chance that it will not work on your card yet” notice on freenode#radeonhd will stop anyone from enjoying this release.
So given it was released today, here is how I compiled it from git.
First get the source.
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/driver/xf86-video-radeonhd/ xf86-video-radeonhd
Now setup a few packages (I am not sure that’s every single on of them, since I already had some in my system):
sudo apt-get install x11proto-fonts-dev x11proto-randr-dev x11proto-video-dev x11proto-xext-dev x11proto-render-dev xlibs-dev xserver-xorg-dev
Also, make sure you already have the proper tools for compiling it:
sudo apt-get install build-essential automake autoconf libtool
Now just go into the xf86-video-radeonhd dir and type:
./autogen.sh && make
If autogen.sh doesn’t crap out, you should be able to compile it successfully. If it does crap out, than leave a comment so I can add the proper package name to this small guide. Now onto testing fun. More on that probably tomorrow.
It’s a(nother) good day for open source.
[...] Here is a quick recipe to getting the latest and greatest radeonhd open source driver for the R5XX/R600 driver series, but this time with dri support. Ubuntu Hardy already has a radeonhd package, but as expected is not updated from the git repo, and does not include the dri extensions. This is an update on previous posts for gutsy and feisty. [...]