ATI And Current Linux distributions

[Urkle]

OK, due to my recent hardware failure of my primary linux box for development, I've had to "find another box" to continue development of the linux patch.. That has led me to get Fedora 11 installed on my Mac Pro (aka BigMac). This beast has 2 video cards currently (the ATI X1900 was removed due to it overheating all the time). So currently it houses an nvidia 7300 and an ATI HD 2600 PCI-E cards.

I finally have linux booting (albeit through some crazyiness to get around the EFI on the mac). It works non the less.

First stop, get the ATI card working (as the nvidia cards I've never had issues with).

Upon looking at the Repository that usually has the ATI drivers I find this post

http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=221242

Apparently NO ATI drivers!!.. Looks like ATI's catalyst 9.3 has no support for 1.6 and no support for kernel, 2.6.29 (the newer drivers don't either)!!!.

This post

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=218937

Talks about the attempts to get ATI's drivers working on Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9 (which both include kernel 2.6.29 and the new Xorg 1.6 release).. Apparently the current "patch" works, but is VERY SLOW and produces a LOT of error output to your system logs.. Not good..

From reading around, current recommendations are to stick with older distributions (Fedora 10 and ubuntu 8) if you want to use accelerated ATI.

This only furthers my frustration with the poor quality of ATI's drivers on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. (Yeah they are bad on mac as well).

Now, what's odd is that nvidia's drivers do not have these issues with newer kernel releases nor newer Xorg releases. (as nvidia has 2 sets of legacy drivers now). It could be because nvidia uses a 'unified driver model' as the call it.. Basically they replace the entire DRI sub-system in Xorg.. I'm unsure how the ATI drivers are written.

Well, I'm trying the Catalyst 9.7 drivers from ATI right now to see if they might work.. But everything looks rather dismal.