AMD / ATI release Linux drivers for their popular graphics cards

It is a common perception among Free software enthusiasts that AMD's acquisition of ATI bodes really good for Linux and Free software. This perception is bang on target because AMD has promised that it will be eventually providing open source drivers for all its graphics cards. Just yet, AMD/ATI has released Linux drivers for its popular range of graphics cards namely ATI Catalyst 7.10 graphics drivers.

So what is so unique about the ATI Catalyst ? Well, ATI Catalyst is a unified software suite which delivers a full software solution for supported Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems. And AMD/ATI claims that all ATI products use the same Catalyst driver ensuring all products take advantage of the incredible performance, stability, innovative features, and visual quality that the Catalyst software suite have to offer. The latest version of ATI Catalyst is 7.10. It has support for AIGLX and ATI GPUs which translates to enhanced performance in playing 3D games such as Quake and Doom.

Fig: ATI Catalyst driver architecture

If you own a ATI graphics card, you may download the driver suite for Linux from AMD's official website. Of course, this driver has not yet been released as open source and is as proprietary as the Nvidia drivers. But with AMD in charge, one can say with certainty that ATI has become a lot more Linux friendly than it was before its acquisition.

Ubuntu plus Dell equals better support for devices in Linux

One of the best things that has happened to Linux enthusisasts the world over is the confluence of two big players one in the Linux arena (Ubuntu aka Canonical) and the other in the PC hardware space (Dell). And the end users have already started reaping the benefits.

The benefits include device driver support for hardware components which were otherwise not compatible with Linux. A couple of years back, I had to struggle getting my internal modem based on a conexant chip to work with Linux. These internal modems are infamously known as winmodems because they delegate some of its job to the parent operating system and work flawlessly only in Windows.

Because they were not full modems, most of them are incompatible with Linux and are as good as paper weight. I have documented how I got my internal modem to work with Linux with some difficulty.

Now the good news is that Dell has released device drivers for the conexant internal modems for their E1505n and 1420n machines which is available here for download.

The driver is provided as a deb package and so will be compatible with other Debian based Linux distributions.

A Device Driver Development Kit for Linux

A driver development kit provides a build environment, tools, driver samples, and documentation to support driver development for a particular operating system. Linux had always lacked a proper driver development kit. And anybody who intended to write a device driver had to do with sifting through tons of documentation and example source code that other operating systems provide for their developers.

Greg KH has posted at LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) that a device driver kit has indeed been released for Linux which contain everything that a Linux driver author would need to create Linux drivers. Additionally, it also contain a copy of the O'Reilly book "Linux Device Drivers". The device driver kit for Linux can be freely downloaded as an ISO image here (92 MB).