ATI Linux Display Driver 8.1 Released

A new version of the ATI/AMD Linux display driver was released last night, for both x86 and x86_64 platforms. This release includes support for new operating systems and also resolves the following issues:

￭ Corruption will no longer be noticed in the lower right corner of the display or on the mouse pointer after the system is running for a long period of time
￭ Connecting a display device that supports 1680x1050 to a system running Linux will no longer result in a maximum display resolution of 1280x1024 only being available
￭ Custom mode lines in xorg.conf will no longer be ignored by the fglrx driver
￭ Suspending to RAM or DISK on kernel version 2.6.23 or later no longer fails

Known issues of this release:

￭ On workstation hardware 3D applications will be corrupted if the screen width is not an integer multiple of 64 pixels, for example with a 1680x1050 wide screen display.
￭ There is no support for video playback on the second head in dual head mode.
￭ Desktop corruption may be noticed when dragging the overlay/video when using dual-display mode.
￭ A black screen may be observed on some hardware when switching to the console or leaving the X window system when a Vesa framebuffer console driver is used.
￭ Display flicker may be noticed when the gnome screen-saver starts
￭ Diagonal tearing may be noticed when playing a video file using a video player that utilizes the XVideo extension
￭ Video playback may look blocky when playing a video file using a video player that utilizes the XVideo extension
￭ Video Playback may display wrong colors and additional shadow images when cropping or expanding a video file using a video player that utilizes the XVideo extension
￭ Building RPM packages for Mandriva may fail

In order to gain the best performance and ease of use, ATI/AMD recommends the following:

￭ Kernel module build environment - should include the following: Kernel source code: either the Kernel Source or Kernel Headers packages.
￭ ISSE Support enabled in your Linux Kernel (applies to Intel Pentium III and later CPUs only; enabled by default on version 2.4 and later kernels).
￭ The rpm utility should be installed and configured correctly on your system, if you intend to install it via RPM packages.

Requirements:

￭ XOrg 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 or 7.3
￭ Linux kernel 2.6 or higher
￭ glibc version 2.2 or 2.3
￭ POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) support is required for 3D applications.

If you have a machine running Linux kernel 2.4, you should install version 8.42.3 of the ATI Catalyst software suite.

Supported operating systems:

￭ Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6
￭ Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1
￭ Ubuntu 7.10
￭ Red Flag DT 6.0
￭ openSUSE 10.3

For installation instructions and more information about this release, please go here.

You can download the ATI/AMD Linux Display Driver now from Softpedia.