Monday, May 16, 2011

FOSS drivers for ATI Mobility HD 5xxx (Evergreen series) on Fedora 14

This post has been migrated from http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/sgordon/2010/12/20/foss-drivers-for-ati-mobility-hd-5xxx-evergreen-series-on-fedora-14/

I have had a laptop with an ATI Mobility HD 5xxx video card for some time now. Getting 3D support for this card on Linux has been painful. Unsupported by the FOSS driver included in Fedora releases the only option has been to install the proprietary Catalyst driver. The Catalyst driver works when available but often releases lag long after the versions of Xorg included in the latest Fedora.

I have recently discovered, via a post on fedoraforum.org, that the updated version of the FOSS driver which is currently in the rawhide repository includes support for cards in this series! To install it you can use the following commands (note that the first is only required if you have previously installed the Catalyst drivers):
 
#/usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh
# yum install fedora-release-rawhide
# yum update --enablerepo=rawhide --nogpgcheck kernel libdrm mesa-* xorg* cairo pixman
# yum remove fedora-release-rawhide

I had some issues with the graphical boot when I rebooted following the installation. By editing my grub settings to ommit the rhgb parameter I was able to successfully boot into my graphical environment which now has 3D acceleration!

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