As of the beginning of November, there are a huge number of updates for PCLinuxOS 2007 available in the repositories. Many of the packages are upgrades to core system files. PCLinuxOS 2007 is a totally different build than its previous versions, with the intention to be a continually upgradeable distro rather than one with limited life, the advantage being that the user will not have to completely reinstall their OS to upgrade to the next and near-future version releases. This first massive batch of updates/upgrades appears to be the first implementation of that functionality (there were 355 upgrades installed in my system).
While it is recommended to upgrade all available packages, doing so will install newer X11 video drivers (ati, vesa, fglrx, fbdev) which will bork the 3D acceleration etc. once again by changing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Sadly, I couldn’t get proper operation with any of the new video drivers.
The solution is: firstly, DON’T PANIC. The new updates greatly simplify installing the proprietary ATI driver package, and the solution is this:
- Uninstall the previous proprietary ATI driver package as described for removing old drivers at the beginning of the post “How-To: ATI Radeon X1600 With PCLinuxOS 2007″.
- Download and install the latest X1600 series installer package from ATI here. (ati-driver-installer-8.42.3-x_86.x86_64.run). Do NOT bother with rebooting between steps, just run the installer as root in the same terminal window you used to uninstall the old ATI software.
- Remember to run ‘aticonfig –initial’ immediately after the install completes.
- Power the machine right off and then boot up again.
That’s it, no other config needed. It just works. Run the ‘glxgears’ command to make sure. [Edit: if you run glxgears and your frame rate is low (60 fps or so), your config was not run properly. Type "aticonfig --inital -f" in a terminal as root to force the config. Reboot. Run glxgears again and the fps should be around 3000.]
Note: I removed the new ‘radeontools’ package with Synaptic because according to the version notes, it is still a work in progress.
