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Hi, I'm Alfredo Matos, a research engineer, programmer and entrepreneur from Portugal. This is my old (and closed) blog. It exists only as an archive. For more information head over to alfredomatos.com or follow me on twitter.

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Compiling the new RadeonHD open source driver on Ubuntu Feisty

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.

Posted By alfmatos

One Response to “Compiling the new RadeonHD open source driver on Ubuntu Feisty”

  1. [...] 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. [...]

About Me

Hi, I'm Alfredo Matos. I'm a research engineer from Portugal, with a passion for inventing new things and working on future technologies. I'm also a programmer and entrepreneur. For more information check out my main website alfredomatos.com.