[conspire] July 11th CABAL meeting cancelled

[Rick Moen]

More afterthoughts.  I replied to Ken:

> Don't forget, if distro release n doesn't support a brand-new
> chipset, such that you need to retrofit some proprietary-driver as
> fallback, odds are that release n+1 will have open-source support
> out of the box.

This is just to review the larger context of that:

Ken mentioned he tends towards CentOS 6.  Current relesae is 6.4, which
is the unbranded rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Update 4.

Distros divide conceptually into rolling distros and release ones, where
the difference relates more-or-less to the pace and timing of updates.
With either type, however, you need to have a starting point:  Thus the
existence of installer media.

A distro's installer disk supports a whole bunch of hardware out of the
box that were known, tested, and worked out by developers.  For most
hardware, that's the kernel developers.  For some other hardware, it's
X.org folk, or developers of CUPS-compatible printer 'filters'
(drivers), or SANE back-ends for scanners, or USB-level drivers in
userspace.  Regardless of which umbrella project (kernel, X.org, SANE,
whatever) collects and curates the drivers, the point is that they all
come together by being packaged into a distro's installer software,
along with code to autorecognise hardware needing each driver and to
load the right driver for that purpse.

The umbrella projects (like X.org) figure out how to support hardware.
Those projects then funnel to the distros, then the distros bundle such
updates into new releases of the distro installer.

With me so far?  Good.  Ken, you said 'CentOS 6'.  Just to make sure you
are aware, if you had, say, a set of CentOS 6.3 or 6.2 DVDs sitting
around, that might come just short of supporting your AMD graphics chip,
whereas CentOS _6.4_ might automagically do it right.

Likewise, you said 'Knoppix'.  Most recent Knoppix release is 7.2.0.
If that's not what you have -- if you have, say, 7.0.5 or 6.7.1 --
then you might be just missing the X.org update that supports your video
chip.

Mind you, Knoppix 7.0.5 was only last December 21, and 6.7.1 was
September 2011, which doesn't seem all that long ago -- unless you're
just missing a critical X.org update.  ;->  There's a reason why I 
try to make an extra effort to keep CABAL's collection of distro CDs and
DVDs up to date, especially for most-needed images.  It's so the rest of
you don't have to.


(Important correction:  While most recent AMD/ATI video chips use
X.org's 'radeon' driver, some apparently use one called 'ati', instead.
I now see that the one integrated into your HP Pavillion's motherboard
is probably the latter, not the former.  Sorry about that.
Authoritative details are at:  http://www.x.org/wiki/radeon )


Additionally, a distro installer disk lacking support for a piece of
hardware isn't necessarily a deal-breaker.  Remember, the distro
installer is _merely_ the means for getting the distro onto the host
hard drive and running.  If you can get it running well enough to run
and pull down update packages, you might find that the updates suddenly
do _add_ support for your hardware -- or, failing that, furnish a
platform on which you can add it without much trouble.

Let's say for the sake of discussion that CentOS 6.4's installer
software _lacks_ support for the AMD Radeon HD7560D GPU chip.  You run
the installer.  It installs.  You reboot to the live system, and it
tries to start X and (ugh) GNOME, using the bundled version of X.org's
'ati' driver because the installer correctly autoprobed your video
hardware as being of the 'atl'-compatible family.

Rats, no X.  But are you stymied?  Nope.  You have a running
terminal-based system, which means you have 'yum' and everything else at
your disposal.  Your system is fully capable of reaching across the
Internet to CentOS yum repos for package updates, including ones for
X.org software.

So, do that.  Update your CentOS system to current 6.4 package spec.  
I notice that http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6.4/os/x86_64/Packages/ 
(the updates dir for 6.4) includes package
xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.99.99-1.el6.x86_64.rpm , which is a revision to the
X.org 'ati' driver.

This FAQ entry purports to document the easy way to get X configured
after installation on CentOS:
http://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/General#head-f9b66646092bdc0de1d8b4c82b427f796adfe2f8
I have no experience with doing it that way.  Here's a more old-school
explanation:  http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/ConfigureNewVideoCard
Or the old classic:

Xorg -configure



Last, don't forget, a successful installation of a terminal-based CentOS
system can, instead, be completed by doing a terminal-based installation
of the AMD/ATI 'fgrlx' proprietary video drivers.

Instructions here:
http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/HardwareList/AtiDriver

(found by Web-searching for 'centos ati driver')