(paid support) Making "Jockey" work in Arch

unkiepunkie · 2010-06-21 15:32:03

My employer needs an easy way for endusers to install the correct video drivers. Therefore we are looking for someone to make Jockey work for Arch Linux. This tool is also known as "Hardware Drivers" in ubuntu, and we think this tool best suits our needs. We will pay for this project upon completion.

From https://launchpad.net/jockey:

Jockey provides an user interface and desktop integration for installation and upgrade of third-party drivers. It is written in a distribution agnostic way, and to be easily portable to different frontends (GNOME, KDE, command line).

If you are interested in doing this job for us, please pm me.

If more information is needed, please reply to this post directly, and I will amend this post.

some-guy94 · 2010-06-21 17:44:37

The fglrx driver won't work well with archlinux since it is slow to support Xorg and kernel updates.

test1000 · 2010-06-21 18:05:33

Why does your employer require "an easy way for endusers to install the correct video drivers" ? Is it expected that these mystical "endusers" will have to install archlinux from scratch? Won't they already see a DE when they log on to their computers thus already have installed open-source drivers?

if opensource drivers is not enough then it would be trivial to detect which gfx card the machine has and then run the equivalent pacman -S nvidia or fglrx cmd... upon the auto setup of these computers... and if they are not auto satup then the admin can do it himself for each comp...

This should tell what card someone has:
lspci|grep VGA

some-guy94 wrote:

The fglrx driver won't work well with archlinux since it is slow to support Xorg and kernel updates.

that might be a problem, but haven't there been unofficial patches which "support" up to kernel 2.6.34 for a long time? Im not sure what the arch policy is on this as i use an nvidia.

tomk · 2010-06-21 18:11:27

Arch does not provide fglrx (catalyst, actually) packages - that's the Arch policy right there.

There are AUR builds, of course, and various user repos IIRC.

some-guy94 · 2010-06-21 18:14:20

test1000 wrote:

some-guy94 wrote:
The fglrx driver won't work well with archlinux since it is slow to support Xorg and kernel updates.
that might be a problem, but haven't there been unofficial patches which "support" up to kernel 2.6.34 for a long time? Im not sure what the arch policy is on this as i use an nvidia.

Thats true, but afaik, they cannot (as easily) patch it to support newer Xorg versions. Is there a catalyst driver support Xorg 1.8?

unkiepunkie · 2010-06-21 19:54:14

To anser the questions:

some-guy94 wrote:

The fglrx driver won't work well with archlinux since it is slow to support Xorg and kernel updates.

We will use the tool for a custom arch based distro where we make sure compatible versions of each are used.

test1000 wrote:

Why does your employer require "an easy way for endusers to install the correct video drivers" ? Is it expected that these mystical "endusers" will have to install archlinux from scratch? Won't they already see a DE when they log on to their computers thus already have installed open-source drivers?

They wont have to install from scratch. The will see a DE. The nvidia/ati drivers are (sometimes) required for fully accelerated opengl support.

test1000 wrote:

if opensource drivers is not enough then it would be trivial to detect which gfx card the machine has and then run the equivalent pacman -S nvidia or fglrx cmd... upon the auto setup of these computers... and if they are not auto satup then the admin can do it himself for each comp...

Sounds trivial enough, but still some tool is needed. The end users are the admins of the machines. We want to provide a gui for doing this.

tomk wrote:

Arch does not provide fglrx (catalyst, actually) packages - that's the Arch policy right there.
There are AUR builds, of course, and various user repos IIRC.

This is for a custom arch based distro, where we will provide the required packages.

Cdh · 2010-06-21 20:52:33

some-guy94 wrote:

The fglrx driver won't work well with archlinux since it is slow to support Xorg and kernel updates.

I like how users still spread FUD about fgrlx.

Vi0l0 found out that catalyst 10.6 is working with plain xorg 1.8 from extra. Also someone posted that catalyst 10.6 is working with 2.6.35 with a minor patch. There is no freaking way it could be LESS fast to support new xorg and kernels.

@unkiepunkie
This sounds not too bad but you should specify more what exactly it needs to be able to do.
If Vi0l0 allows it you could just copy the catalyst repo: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI … positories
After making sure that it is in a stable state, I mean.

I guess it needs to guess the correct driver from the hardware that the user has. For older ATI cards it could get ugly: Newer Catalyst drivers don't support older cards (before HD series I think) and using an old catalyst would mean using an old or patched xorg too.
So maybe for older Cards it should just install the open source drivers, they are actually pretty good for older cards I think.

So only the MODULES array in rc.conf needs to be parsed and either fglrx or radeon enabled. With !radeon there should be no modesetting and fglrx is happy...

nvidia should be less problematic... Only really old cards are not supported.

So what do you want as new functionality besides making jockey work?
* Parse the module array so that either radeon, fglrx, nvidia or i915 is enabled
* maintain modprobe.conf to enable/disable KMS
* Provide xf86-video-ati for older ati cards
* ???

edit: I knew I forgot something:
Creating a xorg.conf could be a problem. I think aticonfig --initial and nvidia-xconfig only work when no X is running... So it has to be done on reboot...? But how? Booting to runlevel 3 and running an automated script would be easiest but what if someone starts a login manager per DAEMONS array?
Maybe a custom mkinitcpio hook for all the driver stuff...

This is getting complex... In my opinion it is exactly this complexity that makes so many things break...

Last edited by Cdh (2010-06-21 20:55:58)

unkiepunkie · 2010-06-22 11:39:36

@Cdh
The difficulties you describe are exactly what I do not have the time for to solve. That is why I'm asking here

Cdh wrote:

I guess it needs to guess the correct driver from the hardware that the user has.

This is exactly what Jockey does (and its predecessor Envy) for, amongst others, video cards.

Cdh wrote:

So what do you want as new functionality besides making jockey work?

We need it to be able to install the most appropriate video drivers. If the items you listed are part of that, then so be it.

Using Jockey is not a hard requirement. Any tool that does the job in a easy way is okay.

eldragon · 2010-06-22 11:51:54

what you need if you plan to deploy arch to end users is a quality assurance team, and roll your own repo to them, with extra install scripts that would configure the systems for them and only offer package versions known to work on their system.

its a LOT of work (ask the ubuntu team .

its not only installed drivers what bring trouble.

unkiepunkie · 2010-06-22 12:35:35

I agree. But a first step is to have a tool to actually install the correct drivers. After that we can work on higher quality.

spiky25 · 2011-11-21 19:24:54

unkiepunkie wrote:

My employer needs an easy way for endusers to install the correct video drivers. Therefore we are looking for someone to make Jockey work for Arch Linux. This tool is also known as "Hardware Drivers" in ubuntu, and we think this tool best suits our needs. We will pay for this project upon completion.
From https://launchpad.net/jockey:
Jockey provides an user interface and desktop integration for installation and upgrade of third-party drivers. It is written in a distribution agnostic way, and to be easily portable to different frontends (GNOME, KDE, command line).
If you are interested in doing this job for us, please pm me.
If more information is needed, please reply to this post directly, and I will amend this post.

Got two choices, use Nvidia gpu or Intel igp, Amd isn't loved on Archlinux so don't expect much, they are worthless on linux also, check phoronix they have made two big benchmarks, one of 40 ati cards on linux, other of 20-30 nvidia cards, there a post on the site about a specialist that have said that Nvidia proprietary drivers is for now the best as no open source drivers come near enough but it's slowly improving ...

bernarcher · 2011-11-21 23:16:22

Time has gone by and this thread is not informative enough to continue.
Closing.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-06-21 15:32:03

(paid support) Making "Jockey" work in Arch

#2 2010-06-21 17:44:37

Re: (paid support) Making "Jockey" work in Arch

#3 2010-06-21 18:05:33

Re: (paid support) Making "Jockey" work in Arch

#4 2010-06-21 18:11:27

Re: (paid support) Making "Jockey" work in Arch

#5 2010-06-21 18:14:20

Re: (paid support) Making "Jockey" work in Arch

#6 2010-06-21 19:54:14

Re: (paid support) Making "Jockey" work in Arch

#7 2010-06-21 20:52:33

Re: (paid support) Making "Jockey" work in Arch

#8 2010-06-22 11:39:36

Re: (paid support) Making "Jockey" work in Arch

#9 2010-06-22 11:51:54

Re: (paid support) Making "Jockey" work in Arch

#10 2010-06-22 12:35:35

Re: (paid support) Making "Jockey" work in Arch

#11 2011-11-21 19:24:54

Re: (paid support) Making "Jockey" work in Arch

#12 2011-11-21 23:16:22

Re: (paid support) Making "Jockey" work in Arch

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