HOW TO: Compiling and Installing the OpenChrome Graphical VIA Driver

[CANDYBOi]

Great effort!
Good news is is it didn't mess anything up, the script itself works as far as I can tell. On the downside it got me no closer to 3D (CN400/PM880).

[TuxCrafter]

The 3D driver stands totally separated from the 2D openchrome driver.

The 3D driver is maintained by the mesa project and should work out of the box after installing the 2D driver.

I have a CN700 based chipset and here it works. Maybe you can contact the Mesa developers?

OpenGL vendor string: VIA Technology
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI UniChrome 20060710 x86/MMX/SSE2
OpenGL version string: 1.2 Mesa 7.0.1

[CANDYBOi]

The 3D driver stands totally separated from the 2D openchrome driver.

The 3D driver is maintained by the mesa project and should work out of the box after installing the 2D driver.

I have a CN700 based chipset and here it works. Maybe you can contact the Mesa developers?

OpenGL vendor string: VIA Technology
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI UniChrome 20060710 x86/MMX/SSE2
OpenGL version string: 1.2 Mesa 7.0.1

That's what I meant by the "downside". It should be working, and yet it isn't. I'm looking through some recent mesa releases, to see if there's a clue in any of them as to why.

On the other hand, I've already tried the last three without success.
I'm gonna see if I can't get my hands on another CN400-chipped notebook and try it out, to rule out my computer being retarded.

EDIT:
Nope. It seems mesa's loading just fine. Going to try downgrading a bit further.

[n00b@linux]

I got things working (both 2D and 3D) on my CN400 by first installing from the repos using Synaptic. Try that and then upgrade to the latest trunk using TuxCrafter's script.

[CANDYBOi]

I did, only it would for some reason not upgrade the Mesa DRI to 7.0.1, but 6.5.2, which has me confused I must say.

[n00b@linux]

I'm speculating, but it could be because of the known problems with the unichrome "3D driver" above MESA 6.4 - see http://wiki.openchrome.org/tikiwiki/...roubleShooting

[tjazar]

I downloaded and ran the script, and everything appears to have worked... except that my monitor's native resolution (1280x800) still doesn't work; I'm stuck in 800x600. My Graphics Card is openchrome, but changing the monitor to "LCD Panel 1280x800" yields a screen full of garbled lines with one perfectly clear box asking me if I want to keep these settings. Any advice? By the way, thanks so much for supporting this script. I've been searching for a solution to this problem, and I certainly appreciate someone who will stand by their work.

- Thomas

lspci output:

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CN700/VN800/P4M800CE/Pro Host Bridge
00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CN700/VN800/P4M800CE/Pro Host Bridge
00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CN700/VN800/P4M800CE/Pro Host Bridge
00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. PT890 Host Bridge
00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CN700/VN800/P4M800CE/Pro Host Bridge
00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CN700/VN800/P4M800CE/Pro Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge
00:06.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR2413 802.11bg NIC (rev 01)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA VT6420 SATA RAID Controller (rev 80)
00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T890 South]
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 60)
00:11.6 Communication controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 80)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 78)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. UniChrome Pro IGP (rev 01)

[xak]

I just used this script on a fresh Gutsy install on a Phylon 7F2WE mini-ITX board, with a CN700 chipset (2GHz CPU, 512MB DDR533). Direct Rendering is now working, and I get just under 1,000FPS in glxgears! 3D has been broken since Edgy for me so I'm very thankful for Gutsy and for this script. Cheers and thanks very much!

I did have some errors during the script, but I just waited them out and haven't seen any problems yet (there were about 50 or so errors regarding scrollkeeper, message was "extra content at the end of the document")

[n00b@linux]

I downloaded and ran the script, and everything appears to have worked... except that my monitor's native resolution (1280x800) still doesn't work; I'm stuck in 800x600. My Graphics Card is openchrome, but changing the monitor to "LCD Panel 1280x800" yields a screen full of garbled lines with one perfectly clear box asking me if I want to keep these settings. Any advice?

Try running a ModeLine in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. That's how I fixed my 1680x1050 problem. Look at your /var/log/Xorg.0.log file for the values you need.

If you have any problems with this make a new thread, link to it in this one and I'll take a look.

[TuxCrafter]

I just read a post somewhere about some 3D troubles with gusty. If you cant get 3D to work try to install the following package, it should be installed already:

sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri

I can create scripts for installing LCD screens with there correct native resolution. Also I can create scripts for solving font rendering problems with LCD screens. However this will take a lot of time supporting. If there is enough amino I will publish them. Because the discussed openchrome driver is a 2D driver only, I thought it was out of the scope of this topic to discuss 3D rendering, LCD setup and font rendering . Any thoughts?