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best distro for ATI+WXGA support?

post #1 of 18
9/12/04 at 4:58pm
Thread Starter 
I've tried SUSE 9.1 Personal , Mandrake 10, Mandrake 10-64 beta, FC2, and RH9. No good.

RH9 and FC2 are junk...(or at least i dont like em). Mandrakes are ok, but for some reason they don't work with my network (and i am not talking about wifi). SUSE was next to perfect except for one fact...on every boot i'd say that the display failed to give proper dimentions blah blah blah and it got very annoying. Sound support wasn't the greatest....but good enough too. I've tried to install the ATI drivers on Mandrake 10 (32bit) and the stupid RPMs wouldn't install.

Are there are "user friendly" (i am not a noob...but i want ease of use) distros that have been tested to flawlessly install the ATI drivers AND have little problems with widescreens?
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post #2 of 18
9/12/04 at 7:50pm
Thread Starter 
ok never mind on that.. well, almost. I reinstalled Mandrake and most everything is working. I still cant get the widescreen to work (i am in SXGA right now) the wifi doesnt work either, but the wired network does. I am having problems installing the ATI drivers. maybe i am trying to install the wrong thing. also, how do i get powermanagement to work? it was automatic for me in SUSE....cant get it open in Mandrake
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post #3 of 18
9/13/04 at 9:56pm
You might have to change your xorg.conf or Xf86.conf to a widescreen mode to get it to work correctly. I have to say that the ati drivers are pretty tempremental. Sometimes you have to disable to modules in your kernel or take them out of your kernel to get em to work properly.
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post #4 of 18
9/14/04 at 9:45am
Dear Friends,
Whatever distro you use, there are kernel modules that will not not allow fglrx frivers to compile, load, &c.
Make sure you have the firmare loaded for wifi, else it will not work.
Now, you can go to http://www.rage3d.com for help with the ati drivers, but, it appears you are running an amd 64 chip, for which, at the moment, the absurdly poor fglrx version 3.12.0 dirvers have no support.
Let us know exactly what kind of ati card, and what wireless card you have. Someone here probably has working drivers and firmware. (Working drivers for ati cards is a sophomorism )

Best,
Martin
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post #5 of 18
9/14/04 at 5:29pm
Thread Starter 
my wifi is: Gigabyte GN-WPEAG b/g
my vid is: ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 128mb Pro.
My cpu: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ ClawHammer with 1mb L2 Cache

My distro: Mandrake 10 (the regular 32 bit version)
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post #6 of 18
9/21/04 at 5:42pm
Ok here ya go:

Gentoo 2.6.7-r11 Kernel
Madwifi to run the wireless with Linux-Wlan ( your wifi is atheros)
I use Xorg you can use Xfree
Everything else should be to your liking or preference.
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post #7 of 18
9/23/04 at 12:54am
Thread Starter 
thanks for the gentoo suggestion...i'll try it out over the weekend.

i was actually planning to get Suse Pro 9.1 because i heard it has ATI driver support and because its 64-bit...can't complain about the 20% speed boost right? is it worth it?
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post #8 of 18
9/23/04 at 7:39pm
Thread Starter 
ugh...i got the Gentoo packages cd and the universal livecd....the install looks long and confusing...is there a way to simplify it?
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post #9 of 18
9/26/04 at 12:13am
Thread Starter 
i just installed SUSE 9.1 Pro and that didn't go so well. It did not support by sound card nor had any ATI drivers on it to allow for hardware 3d accelaration on my 9700 radeon. The availability of packages is HUGE, and power managment (klaptop) work great...however...because I have no sound and it didn't deliver what was my main reason for getting it (ati drivers) didn't work, i am going back to mandrake till next weekend if i can find something else to try.
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post #10 of 18
9/26/04 at 2:45am
I used Slackware 10 with update to the latest kernel and it auto detected resolution and ran great - I hand't worked into getting 3d working though . . . I think the key is not so much the distro but the updated kernel
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post #11 of 18
9/26/04 at 2:51am
abf: I'm trying the same thing here

I just installed Mandrake 10, but no way to get power management, the touchpad or the MR9700 working.

From what I've heard Gentoo seems to be the best, so I'm off to give that a try, there is a nice install guide on their site.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/fr/handboo...?part=1&chap=1
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post #12 of 18
9/26/04 at 6:14am
you guys all this stuff works on linux.

just the distribution can't detect it at install time, so you need to do it later.

Phantom:

for the powermanagement you need to install cpufreqd, and modprobe battery and speedstep-centrino (or whatever it is for you cpu)

for the touchpad you need to install the synaptics drivers.

for the MR9700 you need to find a way to install the ATI drivers, this is the hardest of the three.

---------------

I have gotten all of these to work easily in Debian Unstable. I would suggest you install that distro. Don't let the unstable in the name scare you, it is more stable than Redhat, Fedora, Mandrake, Slackware or Suse in my opinion.
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post #13 of 18
9/26/04 at 8:47am
Agentsim: I'd love to try out debian but that's the only Distro that really scares me

Gentoo is already one the harder ones to install, compared to Redhat, Suse or Mandrake.

I have been messing around with Linux since Slackware 1.0 (very looong time ;-) )

Do you have any idea where I can find those drivers ? and where I could find the driver for the Intel 2200BG Wifi nic ?

From the Debian site:

Quote:
The latest stable release of Debian is 3.0. The last update to this release was made on November 21st, 2003.
This is scary!!
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post #14 of 18
9/26/04 at 9:25am
I'm downloading Mandrake 10.1 AMD64 right now, gonna give that a try and hopefully see some real 64bit power
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post #15 of 18
9/26/04 at 10:57am
Thread Starter 
i tried Mandrake 10.0 for AMD64 beta 2 weeks ago...just as good as the regular Mandrake 10 Official except for packages (rpms) are a pain to find.


btw...as of last night i am running PClinuxOS, i installed the live cd to hdd. Its pretty much a shrunked down version of mandrake.
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post #16 of 18
9/26/04 at 1:03pm
If you can handle Slackware, Debian is no problem.
The update thing is odd, but actually the current unstable is quite up to date (Kernel 2.6.8, KDE 3.3, etc...).

You can get wireless drivers from ipw2200.sf.net
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post #17 of 18
9/28/04 at 10:40am
Gentoo is really not that hard. Debian will work too, it's where Gentoo hails from. So far Gentoo has given me little issue.
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post #18 of 18
9/28/04 at 6:24pm
Thread Starter 
i tried debian yesterday...didn't install right. what crap. plus its based on the 2.4, not the 2.6/
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