XorgOnTheEdge

Revision 110 as of 2008-05-21 15:01:47

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.

Hardy packages

Hardy Heron 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 in https://launchpad.net/~tormodvolden/+archive

xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.8.0+git20080428.070cce52-0ubuntu0tormod

NB: from 20080302, 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

xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd_1.2.1+git20080429.45fdec79-0ubuntu0tormod

The diagnosis tool rhd_conntest is not included in the driver package, but an [attachment:rhd_conntest_20080429_i386 x86 executable] can be downloaded here.

savage driver

Some changes upstream can be tested in this version from https://launchpad.net/~tormodvolden/+archive

xserver-xorg-video-savage_2.2.0+git20080410.9cb124b3-0ubuntu0tormod

mesa libraries

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 [https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers "xorg crack testers" team PPA] for mesa upgrades.

Testing with a live CD/media

This is the safest way of testing. If you copy the script attachment:xorg-edgers-live-test to the Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop CD (I suppose you are using a [https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick bootable USB stick] to avoid burning CDs anyway), you can 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.

Uninstalling, reverting

Please keep track of which packages you install. The easiest 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

Building drivers

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
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 [http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/xorg-server/xorg-pkg-tools/files 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 [https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/88905 bug #88905] for the origin of this script.

Ubuntu Wiki