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Restricted Drivers Manager vs Envy

I have done a bit of testing for Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” on some of our classroom machines this week. These machines are Dell Dimension 4600 with ATI Radeon video cards. Well, as has been my experience with ATI and nVidia with Linux they are a pain in the butt. …all ranting aside I wanted to share how I got them to work on Ubuntu 7.10.

Restricted Drivers Manager

My first attempt was to use the Ubuntu Restricted Drivers Manager that pops up when I first logged into the new installation. This offered, installed and configured an ATI driver… but it didn’t give me direct rendering or allow me to configure the compiz fusion fanciness.

Envy

I was then reminded of a little tool we call Envy (Thanks again Alberto!) so I figured I’d give that a try. I figured one way or the other this machine is going to have to get the non-free cooties, so I may as well go all out and use Envy. I am happy to report that a simple installation of Envy gave me all the effects that I needed and was *so simple*!

If you’re having some trouble fighting with your non-free video card I would suggest trying the Envy tool.

Here are the steps I took:

  1. Download Envy
  2. Open with GDebi Package Installer
  3. Check for 3D rendering (glxinfo | grep ‘direct rendering’)

I don’t know how much simpler it can get than that.

Update: If these minimal steps do not work for you (which I’m finding is the case on more cards than the ones I initially tested on you’ll need to do a few more things:

  1. Launch the graphical Envy installer tool (ALT-F2 “gksudo envy -g”)
  2. Select the driver you need installed (ATI on nVidia)
  3. Follow the steps toward installation
  4. Check for 3D rendering (glxinfo | grep ‘direct rendering’)

If all of these steps don’t work I’m not sure what to tell you.  They’ve worked on the cards that I’ve personally tested but I’m sure there are far more cards out there than I can get my hands on.  The best bet at that point is to probably check out the Ubuntu Forums for support.

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Post a comment — Trackback URI RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Friday, October 26, 2007, at 12:55 pm by Christer Edwards. Filed in Compiz/Beryl.