First impressions of 8.18.6

[Thomas Steffen <steffen dot list dot account at gmail dot com>]

Hi Flavio, hi ATI fan!

Today I tried to set up Flavio's latest fglrx package on my Ubuntu
Breezy amd64 (nicest pure amd64 distribution, imho) installation with
a (white box) ATI 9600.

First of all I would like to say that Flavio has (again) done a
tremendous job. Wrestling with the packages from ATI got me nowhere,
but Flavio's package installs nicely, with the exception of the
control tool.

And yes: this version finally supports pseudo-xinerama in big desktop
mode. Hurray! Imho this is still the only usable mode for dual head,
and it is nice to see that about 3 years after NVidia and 2 years
after Xfree86 ATI finally has this working, too.

The aticonfig tools is interesting. It is command line option driven
(unlike fglrxconfig), which means it is much easier to tune parameters
in xorg.conf, but you have to read the manual now. And it remains a
mystery to me why they replace a perfectly fine configuration
interface (xorg.conf) with a perfectly fine (but different) interface
(the command line options of aticonfig).

There seem to be a few new pitfalls, athough these may also be due to
my upgrade to Breezy. The control panel does not install, because
there are minor version conflicts. If I force it, it stops with an
unknown symbol _ZN13QWindowsStyleC1Ev. Rebuilding it fails in main.cpp
again with QWindowsStyle. I wonder what is different in Ubuntu
compared to Debian unstable?

Unfortunately, the X server also breaks the text consoles: switching
to text mode leaves me with a garbled, but distinctively graphics mode
screen. Restarting the X server freezes the machine, which could get
very anoying in the long run :-).

You have to turn off the Composite extension, or the 3D driver will
refuse to load (I am not sure whether Composite is the default in
Breezy, but I think so). This is not a big loss, because the Composite
extension is unbearable slow on ATI anyway :-)

Then there seems to be a conflict between the Xorg version shipped by
Ubuntu and the ATI driver. Downgrading the libdri.a to the version in
/var/cache/apt/archives/xserver-xorg-core_6.8.2-75_amd64.deb (as
compared to 6.8.2_77 as shipped in Breezy) fixes this. (I thought I
had found a 64bit error related to this in the code, but I does not
really fix the issue...)

XV seems to work again, while I had trouble with it in a previous
release of the driver.

My numbers with fgl_glxgears are:

1516 frames in 5.0 seconds = 303.200 FPS
1843 frames in 5.0 seconds = 368.600 FPS
1845 frames in 5.0 seconds = 369.000 FPS

Not great, but ok for a Radean 9600. ppracer looks the best I have
ever seen it.

So I would say: great work! Apart from the freezing this version is
actually well usable on amd64 and in a dual head configuration.

Thomas