A new version of the ATI/AMD Linux display driver was released last night, for both x86 and x86_64 platforms. This release fixes some important X server bugs, such as:

￭ The X server no longer crashes if the screen resolution is changed in horizontal or vertical desktop setup with a monitor that does not support DDC;
￭ The X server no longer segfaults or fails to initialize DRI if a BusID was specified in an unexpected format in xorg.conf;
￭ The X server no longer freezes on shutdown if atieventsd is running;
￭ The first OpenGL application run after starting a session on X server version 1.4 no longer hangs.

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.