[X.org <--> ATI 4xxx series] Is FreeBSD compatible with my graphic card?

K

Kian

Hi
I am an old user of Ubuntu. But the new Ubuntu (v12.10) is incompatible with me! In fact, it is incompatible with my PC.
My computer graphics card series is ATI Radeon HD 4350.
The ATI 4xxx series cards are no longer supported by the AMD company. the latest published driver for 4xxx series is Catalyst 12.6.
This driver also has a problem with X.org 1.13 and only X.org 1.12 is supported
As you know, Ubuntu and the newset disros (as in Fedora 18) use X.org 1.13 and therefore can not work properly on my computer now. This means that the Linux world has been tight and fleshing for me!
I have two options:
1. Roll-backing to Ubuntu 12.04 that uses the X.org 1.12
2. Migrating to a new operating system, however this new one must not be Windows definitely ;)

Now I have this question: Is FreeBSD compatible with my graphics card? What version of X.org is used in the newest FreeBSD?

Kind regards
 
It's surprising that the open source xorg radeon driver would not support that card. Or maybe you mean the AMD commercial driver? It has never been available on FreeBSD.

At present, xorg-server on FreeBSD is 1.10.6, and the Radeon 4000 series cards I've tested work. I'm using a 4650 right now, and I think I've seen reports of success with the 4350.

FreeBSD does not install xorg or a desktop environment by default. If you'd like to try FreeBSD with xorg installed and configured, PC-BSD is the easiest way to do that.
 
Huh. Well, my 4650 card works well. Better than the Intel 4000 with KMS.

My /etc/make.conf has:
Code: 
WITH_NEW_XORG=yes

And all ports were built with that present.

I have other cards, all 4000-series or earlier, but will have to find another motherboard with a PCIe slot for testing.
 
Kian said:
Are you sure there is a good operation of the open source driver on my "ati 4350 radeon" card? You may want to look at: http://forums.pcbsd.org/showthread.php?t=19106
Click to expand...

"Catalyst" are, AFAIK, the official AMD drivers for Windows. Does not apply to FreeBSD.

I do not have a Radeon HD4350 card to test, but both the HD4650 and HD4850 work well on FreeBSD using the xorg radeon driver. That is running FreeBSD 9.1 amd64 and xorg 7.5.2, xorg-server-1.10.6_2,1. WITH_NEW_XORG=yes is set in /etc/make.conf, KMS is not.
 
For what it's worth, I haven't had an HD4xxx GPU work well in FreeBSD for a long time... On older versions of Xorg, Direct Rendering would get disabled if I ever restarted the X server, and on newer versions of Xorg, the entire computer locks up when restarting the X server. This, sadly, has been true on two separate computers of mine. In addition, I had serious redraw issues in X for a long time.

Adam
 
In case is still relevant, I tried (and failed) last week to configure a FreeBSD box for XBMC using my HD4200 integrated graphics card. I made it work with Ubuntu Server 13.04 (after trying CentOS and ArchLinux) and following this. Is working now but I don't want to use Ubuntu =/
 
Well, these instructions are for Linux, which has AMD Catalyst support. Like it says throughout this thread, in FreeBSD you only have the Xorg drivers for ATI cards.

If you feel that you *must* have Catalyst installed, it's maybe best if you stick to Linux. You've got a large variety of distros to choose from but there are three that in my oppinion feel most like FreeBSD: Slackware, Gentoo and Debian. These are all really good operating systems.

I still prefer FreeBSD though, because it feels like a combination of all three and runs *really* well, so I forgave it not having the AMD Catalyst -- I'm not going to use it for gaming. For videos Xorg drivers are more than enough: I used multimedia/mplayer on an HD 1080p video and I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. I don't know about the desktop effects, but I can tell transparency works like it should :D
 
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