Arch Linux

mjakov

Member

Registered: 2015-09-08

Posts: 1

Built-In Graphic Drivers for ATI Radeon 3000 - Arch vs. Centos

*** Arch. vs. Centos: Flexibility and Configurability vs. Usability ***

Dear Arch users!

I would like to hear some of your thoughts about Arch usability in a real enterprise environment having now spent a good week, mostly trying to configure the graphics chipset and X system Here is my situation. Having experience with Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Mint, I decided to try Arch, because unlike Gentoo it offered precompiled packages. I managed to setup LVM, disk encryption, and install the base system relatively fast by following the wiki articles. But then came the graphics card and the X System. Neither of the supported drivers worked for my integrated graphics chipset: AMD/ATI Radeon 3000 RS780L. The radeon and vesa drivers from the official pacman repository did not work and sometimes even garbled the text on the screen, thus forcing me to repeatedly reboot the machine. The X11 log messages were very terse and I could not find a good manual about its configuration except for googling what other people asked on the forums. I followed the Arch wiki tutorial on AMD/ATI graphic chipsets and installed the legacy catalyst driver. But this did not help much. In the end X gave a message that the graphic chipset was recognized but that the board (I suppose the motherboard) is not. Modprobe showed that the catalyst driver was loaded but unused by other modules. In Centos, the radeon driver that worked perfectly was used by three other modules.

The Centos installation, while not providing all the flexibility of the command line install of Arch, configures X11 and the graphic card drivers automatically by using the radeon driver. Are these the same open source drivers as in Arch? How can this be checked; can the Centos driver or X configuration be reused in Arch. Unlike Arch, Centos does not use the .Xinit nor the /etc/X11/... xorg.conf files, so it appears that the configuration is somehow embedded in the system. Notwithstanding, Centos correctly recognized my hardware. Altough I like Arch's open philosophy, having to deal with all the quirks of X for unsupported chipsets surely isn't the most productive use of any system admin's time, in my oppinion.

Best regards!
mjakov

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 13,354

Re: Built-In Graphic Drivers for ATI Radeon 3000 - Arch vs. Centos

Arch usability in a real enterprise environment

Has been discussed often , arch rolling release updates are usually mentioned as the biggest blocker for enterprise environments.

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky