I wrote “Howto Install ATI Drivers (Mesa 3D DRI Experimental) on Fedora 12 Linux” a few months ago, because there is no way to install ATI’s proprietary drivers on Fedora 12. And the situation is no better either with Fedora 13.

I can’t understand, that why AMD can’t publish new ATI graphics card drivers for new Linux kernels and X.org. For example, the nVidia Linux driver releases succeed as easily as the Windows drivers. Well, fortunately, there is a reasonably effective alternative for ATI’s proprietary drivers. Simply use Fedora 13 own integrated ATI radeon drivers (3D support for R600 and R700 cards and 2D support for R800 cards). This radeon drivers has moved out of experimental status on Fedora 13 release.

Verify that the ATI Radeon Drivers is working

glxinfo |grep -i "\(render\|opengl\)"
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R600 (RV635 9598) 20090101  TCL DRI2
OpenGL version string: 2.0 Mesa 7.8.1
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.10
OpenGL extensions:

Important rows, should look following:

direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R600 (RV635 9598) 20090101 TCL DRI2
OpenGL version string: 2.0 Mesa 7.8.1

Configuring Xorg (optional)

If you need some special settings for xorg.conf file, then create xorg.conf file with following method:

Change to root User

su -
## OR ##
sudo -i

Create xorg.conf file with following command:

system-config-display --noui --set-driver=radeon

Then modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and check/add following lines:

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option      "AIGLX" "On"
        ...
EndSection
 
Section "Device"
        ...
        Driver      "radeon"
        Option      "DRI" "On"
        ...
EndSection
 
Section "DRI"
        Mode         0666
EndSection
 
Section "Extensions"
        Option      "Composite" "On"
EndSection

Finally add needed rows.

I have used Mesa 3D DRI drivers for a while with ATI Radeon HD 3650 Graphic Card and they seem to work nicely with Fedora 13 and dual monitor.

Please leave a comment and let me know if you encounter problems with the Mesa 3D drivers or get the AMD’s ATI Catalyst proprietary drivers to work in Fedora 13.

Fedora 13 ATI Catalyst 10.10 Proprietary Drivers (fglrx) Install/Uninstall guide >>