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.