17/11/2009

ATI woes

I had a go at installing SuSE 11.2 on Xanthippe, my slightly mercurial desktop computer (Athlon 64bit, ATI graphics, Atheros WLAN chip). The 11.0 kernel kept warring with the WLAN chip, so it was time for an upgrade.
After a normal install, the system claimed to have no working graphics during the configuration reboot (c'mon, it's only an elderly Radeon X1300) and started the console YaST.
Well, the console YaST ist quite usable, so I just went along with it, until YaST crashed during the network setup and left me with a bare console and no users created except root.
Right. Deep breath.
Console login, open YaST, get the bare necessities. I set up my own user account, added a few repositories and installed a console browser, just in case. At this point lynx insisted on installing Adobe Flash, which was about the only thing I found amusing by that time.
The ATI 11.2 repo link from opensuse.org didn't work with YaST, so I got the driver download link from the ATI homepage, fed it to wget and started the shell script.
The driver refused to install or create an RPM, which might have been due to the fact that ATI stopped supporting most non-HD cards in March. Thank you, ATI! I began looking for a cheap Nvidia card on ebay…
I still don't quite understand why the open radeonhd driver (installed and updated) didn't work with my card, as it is listed in the 'supported' category. As I am not going to use Xanthippe much in the next two years, I capitulated and installed 11.1, which just worked™.
I suspect this is my last ATI post ever.

1 comment:

DaWuzzzz said...

When will they ever learn that we in fact want to have good driver support??