Novell whips out open source ATI Radeon driver

[Apoptosis]

NOVELL SUSE has released an alpha level video driver for ATI Radeon R5xx/R6xx boards, it says on its website.

The software release comes just eight days after AMD open sourced the register specs for the cards. It supports only initial mode settings at the moment, but SUSE developers plan to add support for more hardware, RanR 1.2, video overlay and 2D acceleration soon.

You can get the alpha driver from the multi-distribution packages (Fedora, Mandriva, SUSE Linux Enterprise, and of course openSUSE) in the openSUSE Build Service at: http://download.opensuse.org/repositori ... /radeonhd/

[dgood]

Does this mean ati cards might actually work as well for eye candy in linux as nvidia finally? since none of the ati drivers even from ati themselves work at all.

[Apoptosis]

Being Open Source we could only hope!

[kenc51]

Does this mean ati cards might actually work as well for eye candy in linux as nvidia finally? since none of the ati drivers even from ati themselves work at all.

You might have to wait a while as they are in early alpha stages.
According the TheInq, they were released 8 days after ATI released the specs on their GPU internal registers

I'm going to DL and install SUSE on the laptop and see what they're like. (I don't want to mess with my Ubuntu install)
Also, I've never had an issue with the proprietary drivers with Ubuntu

[dgood]

I have had plenty of issues with opengl in my ubuntu install. the ati driver works for display resolutions and refreshrates, but nothing for opengl. the screen savers lag on my x1800 even. Beyrl crashes and so does compiz.