Hardware support: Radeon HD 4870 with Xorg
Hardware support is a big deal. When you buy a piece of junk, you expect it to work. And when this piece of junk is required to run software, you need it to work. Nowadays, there is no salvation without a graphics card, not only for games but even for desktop apps that are designed with composite-effects supports in mind etc.
Apple always targetted wealthy customers by providing rock-solid software designed to run on rock-solid hardware. It is not quite a challenge, actually, to provide unbuggy software when you only support your own hardware (and at the same time when you claim one cannot -legally- run MacOS X on anything else than an Apple).
It is way harder to support plenty of hardware, including that you have no clue about the internals design. But that is what provides freedom to the user: freedom to change piece of hardware whenever he wants, freedom to select which piece he wants – not the kind of freedom you enjoy at AppleStore where you have only two costy options of harddisks. Apple never thought of democratizing their stuff, that’s not their business plan.
Still, hardware support is probably what’s harming Libre Software OS most. The issue is still the same over the years, hardware producers count on Libre Software community to provide drivers for Libre Software environment -at no point they deliver by themselves Libre and quality drivers-, which implies Libre Software is lagging to provide efficient specific hardware support.
I experienced it this morning. Yesterday, I upgraded my workstation. I was using xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd drivers until today with the Radeon HD 4870 (RV770) I have here. Next time I booted the workstation, I got a blank screen when Xorg started. At some point, I found out it had to do with firmware-linux-nonfree, I filled a bug and was advised to use xserver-xorg-video-radeon instead of xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd. I did that and now it works (with xserver-xorg-video-radeon 6.12.192-2: DRI/hardware acceleration, composite effects, etc), with the latest kernel available (linux 2.6.32-4-amd64).
Here’s the content of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf that works:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
Driver "kbd"
Option "AutoRepeat" "500 30"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "fr"
EndSectionSection "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSectionSection "Device"
Identifier "Sapphire RADEON HD 4870"
Driver "radeon"
Option "DRI" "on"
Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"
Option "DDCMode" "on"
EndSectionSection "Monitor"
Identifier "LG L194WT"
Option "DPMS"
EndSectionSection "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "Sapphire RADEON HD 4870"
Monitor "LG L194WT"
DefaultDepth 24
EndSectionSection "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
It may seems easy-going, nonetheless, it took my hours to find out the exact cause of the problem, googling about, doing tests by reverting my system to previously installed package, etc.
But that’s still easier than coping with issues like one can suffer on a proprietary operating system, with no way to find out what exactly changed on this computer during the latest upgrade. For the record, I have no way to access the ATI graphics card configuration tool (called Catalyst Control Center, CCC.exe) on Microsoft Windows XP since its latest upgrade. But I won’t even bother to try to work out the undecipherable, I’ll just wait passively for a new CCC.exe release.
