Ubuntu Wiki

Warning: This is for testing only! Expect to screw up your X if you try this out. This page is meant to help testing of new upstream versions, to see if they fix Ubuntu bugs. If they do, a fix might be backported to the official packages, or they will be available in the next Ubuntu release.

If you only want to upgrade to newer, stable driver releases, see the X Updates PPA.

Jaunty packages

Ubuntu 9.04 ships with xorg-server 1.6 and mesa 7.4. There are some updated drivers in https://launchpad.net/~tormodvolden/+archive/ppa and updated libdrm and -intel driver stack in https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

Intrepid packages

Ubuntu 8.10 ships with xorg-server 1.5.2 and mesa 7.2. There is an xorg-server 1.5.3 in https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa which can be installed without any new dependencies.

ati driver

The 6.9.0+git20081003.f9826a56 version of the ati/radeon driver is in Intrepid. Together with mesa 7.2, it provides 3D support for R500 cards. Note that there are now separate packages for -radeon, -mach64 and -r128. The -ati wrapper package depends on all three. Newer test packages for ati/radeon are in https://launchpad.net/~tormodvolden/+archive/ppa

radeonhd driver

Most card will do fine with the ati driver above, but for those who want to test out radeonhd, try the test packages in https://launchpad.net/~tormodvolden/+archive/ppa

Hardy packages

Ubuntu 8.04 ships with Xorg 7.3 and an updated xorg-server 1.4.

ati driver

The 6.8.0 version of the ati (radeon) driver is in Hardy and also works with R500 cards (no 3D yet). Newer test packages are in https://launchpad.net/~tormodvolden/+archive/ppa

NB: from the 20080302 version, the -ati driver does not support mach64 and r128 cards any longer, they have their own drivers.

radeonhd driver

The new open-source, AMD-sponsored radeonhd driver for 1xxx-2xxx cards is in universe: xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd (2D only) A newer test version of xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd can be found in https://launchpad.net/~tormodvolden/+archive/ppa

The diagnosis tool rhd_conntest is not included in the driver package, but an x86 executable can be downloaded here.

mesa libraries, drm modules, xserver

Upgrading mesa libraries involves more dependencies on other libraries and kernel modules and is not so straight forward as a simple card driver package upgrade. See the "xorg crack testers" team PPA for mesa upgrades and corresponding driver packages.

Testing with a live CD/media

This is the safest way of testing. Download the xorg-edgers-live-test script from the Xorg packaging tools repository and copy it to a Ubuntu Desktop CD (I suppose you are using a bootable USB stick to avoid burning CDs anyway). Then boot the CD/media, switch to a virtual console with ctrl-alt-F1 and type:

sudo sh /cdrom/xorg-edgers-live-test

and it will automatically download the packages from the "xorg crack testers" team, build kernel modules and restart X, all inside the "live" session without touching your hard drive. See also the announcements on the Phoronix forum: -radeon and -intel

Uninstalling, reverting

Please keep track of which packages you install manually or from a PPA. One way to revert to the standard versions, is to uninstall the packages sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg-core etc, etc, and clean up /etc/apt/sources.list if you changed it, and reinstall from normal repositories: sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core

You can also use apt-cache policy xserver-xorg-core to see what the version is in the main repository, then install this version with for instance:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core=2:1.6.0-0ubuntu4

To see if you have any packages installed from a PPA, run this command after disabling the PPA: apt-show-versions | grep -v uptodate

Building drivers yourself

You can grab the source from Hardy or Debian experimental (or unstable) and build them on your own system. Example for an ati driver:

Find the experimental packages from http://packages.debian.org/xserver-xorg-video-ati and download the .orig.tar.gz, .diff.gz and .dsc files.

sudo apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-video-ati
dpkg-source -x xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.6.191-1.dsc
cd xserver-xorg-video-ati-6.6.191
# apply any test patches here
debuild -b -us -uc
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.6.191-1_i386.deb

In many cases this will build and install nicely without changes. Otherwise you'll have to patch them... The official Ubuntu source and patches (for older versions) can be found through for instance http://packages.ubuntu.com/xserver-xorg-video-ati . Download and unpack them as for the Debian packages, and look at the patches in the debian/patches directory.

Latest drm kernel modules

If you would like to try the latest drm from git, you can use the easy-drm-modules-installer script which will assist you in downloading, compiling and installing the latest drm modules from upstream. Download it from the Xorg packaging tools repository.

The script should start by double-clicking on the downloaded file, however you might have to right-click on it -> Properties -> Permissions and enable "Execute" first.

If the latest drm version does not work, you can delete the drm-yyyymmdd directory which the script created, and download an older version and rename its "drm" directory to "drm-yyyymmdd" and put it in the same directory as the script. See bug #88905 for the origin of this script.

Newer kernels

For unofficial Ubuntu packages of newer kernels, see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds

Links

• http://wiki.debian.org/XTips Building Debian packages from git

• Bugs/AtiDriver

CategoryExperimentalEdge