Great news for the owners of on-board Radeon X1200/1250 Series graphics, fglrx is not required to run Compiz. We can finally become completely “free”. We are using open source radeonhd drivers developed by SUSE engineers on the latest Xorg release.

Changed the following in xorg.conf and viola Compiz is running here!!

Section “Device”
Option “DRI” “1″ #and this works even with radeonhd drivers

Thanks to whoever is responsible for this

Update: Sndirsch just informs that this will be default on openSUSE 11.1, so probably right  from Beta 2 Compiz should work out of box on the hardwares using radeonhd drivers.

openSUSE 11.0 just went Gold, and would be available on mirrors in 5 days, here is a handy guide to get ATI and NVIDIA drivers, use whichever way that suite you.

Or commandline friendly

su -c “OCICLI http://opensuse-community.org/ati.ymp”

su -c “OCICLI http://opensuse-community.org/nvidia.ymp”

One more commandline way via zypper:

NVIDIA:

zypper sa http://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/11.0 nvidia

zypper in x11-video-nvidiaG01

ATI:

zypper sa http://www2.ati.com/suse/11.0 ati

zypper in  x11-video-fglrxG01

No manual configuration of xorg.conf or switching on Xgl required to get compiz goodness, just launch simple-ccsm and enable compiz from there after installing the drivers.

As I build fglrx drivers for personal use and have to build them on every update of kernel from the patches and specs created by sndirsch over at X11:Drivers:Video repository on openSUSE Build Service, I decided to share them here in case someone wants to test Compiz and other 3D stuff on Beta3.

The packaging is not distribution quality, just posting as I found a lot of visitors refered from google search with ATI fglrx on openSUSE 11.0.

Here are the steps to perform in shell as root:

• Make sure you are running exactly the following kernel(openSUSE installs pae kernel, install the default one for these drivers to work) :

uname -a
Linux prime 2.6.25.3-2-default #1 SMP 2008-05-10 07:46:36 +0200 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

• wget -c http://giannaros.org/other/cyberorg/ati/fglrx-drivers-2.6.25.3-2-default-i586.tar.bz2

•  tar xvf fglrx-drivers-2.6.25.3-2-default-i586.tar.bz2

•  rpm -Uvh *fglrx* -force -nodeps (required as I’ve been lazy changing the version miss-match, note that there are double-dashes in front of force and nodeps, wordpress messes them up)

•  init 3

•  sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx

•  init 5

•  Run simple-ccsm as normal user and enable “Desktop Effects”

Did you note that there is no editing of xorg.conf? BTW, you won’t have to do all this hard work when 11.0 is released as the drivers would be available via 1-click and directly through yast when you add ATI/NVIDIA repo. All thanks to openSUSE’s X team and Stefan Dirsch

Have a lot of fun!

Couple of days back the new drivers were released. Here is the changelog from our friend sndirsch, maintainer of X for openSUSE:

 Sat Jan 19 00:05:37 CET - sndirsch
- update to release 8.45.4
* Corruption will no longer be noticed in the lower right corner
of the display or on the mouse pointer after the system is
running for a long period of time
* Connecting a display device that supports 1680×1050 to a system
running Linux will no longer result in a maximum display
resolution of 1280×1024 only being available
* Custom mode lines in xorg.conf will no longer be ignored by the
fglrx driver
* Suspending to RAM or DISK on kernel version 2.6.23 or later no
longer fails

It is still not possible to play videos when compiz is running like we can do it on nvidia drivers. The ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager options required are here.