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Discussions Rules and Guidelines
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In general the guy who announces these releases tells gamers to use them - I think they are giving up the pretence of having stable drivers and since on linux there is no windows signing it really makes little difference.
The only slight annoyance is an ugly logo in the bottom right telling you the drivers are testing only (which if you google or look around in here you'll find information to remove this)
If you're using a journalling FS like ext4 you should be fine anyway. Worse that will happen is if X locks up when running a game that means your keyboard and mouse don't respond and you need to reset (or use alt-sysrq http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key to try and get control back to shutdown cleanly - most times alt-sysrq s u and b work to sync the disks, remount read only and force a boot)
That said, I've not had this problem occur using 12.11 beta 11 to play the games in the steam linux beta. So don't read the above as though it's going to happen. The drivers seem pretty stable and most of the bugs in the games and steam are not causing system instability.
In most cases the 2d side of things works as usual.
I use the script here to remove the testing only watermark:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2076381
I've no idea how to do that, heh. This is my first time fiddling with beta video drivers.
Which I've never had installed on this system. What's wrong with the script?
*be sure to uninstall fglrx first (if it's installed of course)*
Download Catalyst 12.11 beta 11.[www2.ati.com]
Assuming you put the sh file in your home directory, run the following commands in the terminal:
Then:
Then:
Lastly:
*To remove the testing watermark*
Replace "UNSIGNED" with:
*Reboot*
Well the potential for that to happen exists whatever driver you install if you update the kernel. Not necessarily "every time" though
Ok, so after I install the beta package (assuming everything works fine after that), I don't need to worry about updating anything or re-configuring anything every time the kernel gets updated, right? And I only need to worry about updating the driver every time AMD releases a new one, right?
Sorry if I'm sounding noobish, but after the experience with xorg-edgers I'm a little scared about updating my driver...
No, as I said, the potential for something to stop working exists if you update something else.
There's nothing you can do to avoid that possibility. You just have to learn how to fix things when they break. That's just experience.
So, for example, if you update the kernel, it may affect your 3d drivers, because part of those 3d drivers is loaded into and forms part of the kernel - they work closely together and one depends on the other.
My point was, it may affect non-beta drivers too.
Imagine the word "beta" means nothing at all. There's no special state for software where it doesn't work and it's called a "beta" and then it does, so it isn't. It's just a marketing word these days. Originally it was a word to let a company be honest about some of their bugs whilst still being able to pretend it's possible to write software that doesn't have them :-)
So, the best thing to do is to only update things if there's some positive, meaningful reason for doing so. Like, if you believe the beta drivers will run games better and avoid a bug in so-called stable driver, then use those drivers. Or if a piece of software fixes a security bug.
Although at the moment I would say I have no evidence at all that there are AMD drivers that make the most performance hungry Steam linux applications work well. I've tried 5 Steam linux games so far - Killing floor, TF2 which I owned before, the demos of World of goo and unwritten tales and 1 game I've just bought - Trine 2.
3 of them run well enough, performance wise to sit and play, Trine 2 and the 2 demos.
2 of them don't - TF2 and Killing floor.
All of them run well enough (with some caveats like disabling in the in-game shift-tab thing or running them directly from the command line and making sure you manually install dependencies and so on) that the only real big elephant in the room issue left is performance. It just sucks, and so much that it makes games like TF2 and Killing Floor pretty much unplayable.
Now it could be I have broken something - the hardware should be ok (I can play the same games in windows and they fly) or it could be some issue with the ports themselves. Although I suspect the most likely culprit will be the drivers.
YMMV, but if you're struggling with the hassle of installing and trying different drivers and don't want to break things unnecessarily, you might want to wait until a lot of people start reporting that performance is fixed and going through the pain is worthwhile.
That said, there's some mileage of course in finding and reporting the other bugs, but once you get to the stage that tf2 starts and runs and you can join a game, it's difficult to sit and play it for a few hours to find other issues when it doesn't perform well enough to do that.
That being said, I did install the driver directly from their website (following the instructions on this post verbatim), and after installing, aticonfig wouldn't start (in the terminal it said something along the lines of "no device found" or some such) and when I rebooted into Ubuntu everything was in 2-d and aticonfig once again wouldn't start. Luckily it was easy to uninstall the driver and reinstall the "stable" driver provided by Ubuntu. I had this same sort of problem years ago with nvidia, so I think I've just got bad luck when it comes to newly-released video drivers.