[Notice] Fedora 9 and Livna, RPMFusion, nVidia+Catalyst drivers

[Firewing1]

Update 2008/05/28: nVidia has released a new driver that adds preliminary support for Xorg 1.5. It will available in Livna tomorrow, early adopters can manually download the new RPMs here. AS well, RPMFusion is under way and the last bugs concerning CVS access are being worked out.

I've been seeing a few confused reports about the status of Livna, the Catalyst drivers and the nVidia drivers on F9 here is what is going on:

• Livna: There are a few packages already in the F-9 repository, however Thorsten (knurd on #livna) has been very busy lately getting his work done, Livna for F-9 as well as rpmfusion up and running so please be patient, all the work he's doing isn't easy! It might take until the end of the week or so sort things out.
• RPMFusion: Same as above. CVS, build server and FAS are ready to go so once Thorsten is able to finalize the configuration, RPMFusion will be officially launched.
  I'm not 100% sure about this, please correct me if I'm wrong.
• The nVidia drivers are not compatible with the development version of Xorg shipped with F-9. A patched nVidia driver for kernel 2.6.25 is available in livna-testing, however you must modify your configuration to disable 3D as shown here. Alternatively, downgrade Xorg and mesa-libGL to the F-8 versions.
• The Catalyst driver has been patched to work with 2.6.25, however due to a symbol export problem it will not load under x86_64 systems. To make matters worse, the Catalyst 8.04 drivers are also incompatible with F9's Xorg version. See here for more information.

Hopefully new driver releases from both nVidia and AMD/ATI will fix the problem. The 8.05 drivers will be released within the next week or two, so we will find out soon.

Firewing1

[kevmif]

Thanks for the update mate.... as users we really appreciate being kept 'in the loop' about this sort of stuff!

Will the X server make its estimated release target of May do you think? A released and supported version would be sweet!

[phkahler]

You didn't mention the "nouveau" option for nvidia users. It doesn't have 3D support, but I've seen people indicate that it's much faster (for video) than the default "nv" driver. It also seems to fix some resolution problems a couple people were having with nv.

I'm still downloading, but I plan to try nouveau after updates.

[Firewing1]

Originally Posted by kevmif

Thanks for the update mate.... as users we really appreciate being kept 'in the loop' about this sort of stuff!

Will the X server make its estimated release target of May do you think? A released and supported version would be sweet!

I'm not sure - As far as I know the release is still on track.

Originally Posted by phkahler

You didn't mention the "nouveau" option for nvidia users. It doesn't have 3D support, but I've seen people indicate that it's much faster (for video) than the default "nv" driver. It also seems to fix some resolution problems a couple people were having with nv.

I'm still downloading, but I plan to try nouveau after updates.

That's true, I forgot about the nouveau driver. I haven't tried it in a long time since every time I tried my machine hanged (complete hang, couldn't even SSH) - Does it crash less often now?
Firewing1

[gertdesmet]

Thanks for the info Firewing1.

[Thetargos]

Thanks for the heads up, Firewing1. I already have my images sitting on my HDD waiting to be burnt into DVD... However I guess I'll wait until the issues pertaining graphics drivers are resolved prior to install. I happen to have my main system running an nVidia part, and my laptop an ATi part (not supported yet by the radeonhd driver with 3D), so I guess I'll wait a bit longer to install.

[phkahler]

Originally Posted by Firewing1

That's true, I forgot about the nouveau driver. I haven't tried it in a long time since every time I tried my machine hanged (complete hang, couldn't even SSH) - Does it crash less often now?
Firewing1

I've been following TiNDC on the nouveau site, and they talked about a first "official" release for "2D only" a couple months ago. They decided to wait apparently - I don't think they want a flood of casual testers just yet. 2D with EXA and Xv are supposed to be fairly solid on everything except on the newest generation of cards (check their status matrix). 3D is making incredible progress, but is not actually usable for anything but development.

Firewing1, you're not afraid to use the CLI to set things back to normal if X is broken, so I'd say try it out and let us know how it goes.

[ajamison]

I guess this would explain why the ATI drivers were removed from the stable repo of Livna

[PeTzZz]

If I add Livna repo now and want to replace it with RPMFusion one when it comes out, would there be any conflicts between installed Livna packages and RPMFusion packages?

[Phantom_Lord]

Hi guys. I already installed Sulphur (early in the morning), the x86_64 version, on my notebook. I'm with an ATI chipset and built in video card . I guess I'll have to wait some time before the livna development crew makes the fglrx driver, because the official ATI driver does not work. I tried to build packages for Fedora 9 and nothing happened - it spit a lot of errors (the first ones were something about missing files in /tmp ?????) and I gave up.... I'll try again tomorrow, but I don't expect success.
So - I would like to know if someone has any info concerning the livna kmod-fglrx release schedule or something like that.

Thank You in advance.

[Firewing1]

Originally Posted by PeTzZz

If I add Livna repo now and want to replace it with RPMFusion one when it comes out, would there be any conflicts between installed Livna packages and RPMFusion packages?

Shouldn't be, as far I know there will be clean upgrade path.

Originally Posted by Phantom_Lord

Hi guys. I already installed Sulphur (early in the morning), the x86_64 version, on my notebook. I'm with an ATI chipset and built in video card . I guess I'll have to wait some time before the livna development crew makes the fglrx driver, because the official ATI driver does not work. I tried to build packages for Fedora 9 and nothing happened - it spit a lot of errors (the first ones were something about missing files in /tmp ?????) and I gave up.... I'll try again tomorrow, but I don't expect success.
So - I would like to know if someone has any info concerning the livna kmod-fglrx release schedule or something like that.

Thank You in advance.

Livna packages the drivers from ATI.com as well, but makes modifications so that it is more compatible with the way the Fedora systems are set up (one example is it does not replace your original libGL libraries). Unfortunately this means that the same problems exist with the ones directly directly from ati.com - We can only wait for now.
Firewing1

[ajamison]

Well graphics aside F9 seemed to all the sudden forget i had a network card and refused to discover it again on multiple boot so i trashed F9 and went back to F8 I am sorry if the developers are reading this but F9 was not ready to be shipped it has way to many bugs

[RahulSundaram]

Hi,

Hmm. Was a bug report filed? Might try stopping NetworkManager and starting the network service as a workaround.

[ajamison]

tried that and no i have not yet filed one I can however all my logs are gone i went back to f8 till f9 becomes a little more stable

[glynns10]

i download and tried fedora9, but it says it cannot display 2... i have a nvida 8500 card, can anyone help me, and please remember i'm a rookie with this...