CentOS - Jan 2010 - Centos and RadeonHD 4570

Hi guys,

Recently I've done a bad bad thing, buying a laptop with an ATI card.
The card itself is supposed to be quite decent performance wise, but
the ATI drivers still suck a lot.
I haven't yet tried booting Centos on this laptop, but I used a Fedora
12 LiveCD. Fedora displays things nicely, but no 3D accel (I like to
play OpenArena/Tremulous every now and then).
After some serious googling I learned that I cannot even install ATI
Catalyst driver on Fedora, because of too new Xorg.
Do you have any success stories with running Centos and have 3D
acceleration on this video card?

lspci reports:

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS780M/RS780MN
[Radeon HD 3200 Graphics]
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M92
[MobilityRadeon HD 4500 Series]

Yes, 2 gpus. I think it's this hybrid thing:
http://ati.amd.com/technology/hybridgraphics/technology.html

Your feedback will be appreciated. I will not end up using Win7.

On Sun, 2010-01-17 at 21:44 +0000, Lucian @ lastdot.org
wrote:
> Recently I've done a bad bad thing, buying a laptop with an ATI card.
I have a less-than-ideal but so-far working setup with Centos 5 on this
computer which has a Radeon x1950 card in it.

When I first set this machine up I put Fedora 10 on it and it "just
worked".  But I changed it over to Centos 5 a couple of months ago and
have found that drivers that come with Centos 5 don't support this card
properly; "man radeon" doesn't list it as a supported card; it was
listed as supported by Fedora 10.  It works with the vesa driver, but
not at the 1680x1050 resolution that my monitor uses.

I reluctantly downloaded and installed
ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run

Now my monitor runs at 1680x1050 like it should.  It's my understanding
that the 3d stuff doesn't work completely right because I seem to have a
strange mix of SGI, ATI and Mesa listed when I run glxinfo, but since I
don't do 3d stuff it really doesn't bother me.  3d does actually
work,anyway, because glxgears runs and gives me about 2030fps, so I
don't know if I'm actually missing out on anything.

I'm kind of hoping that a Centos update will come around that supports
my Radeon x1950 card natively so I can get away from the ATI proprietary
junk that I seem to be stuck with at the moment.

-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com