Brice Goglin's Blog - Debian X.org notes - ATI 6.7.191 with RandR-1.2 and TV-out support in experimental

08:53 - Debian X.org notes - ATI 6.7.191 with RandR-1.2 and TV-out support in experimental

No, I am not confusing version numbers. Yes, xserver-xorg-video-ati 6.7.191 follows 6.6.193. Upstream thought it was useless to try fixing the dead-end 6.7 branch (where 6.6.193 came from) since they were already mostly working on the randr-1.2 branch. So 6.7 will probably never happen. The randr-1.2 support has been merged in master and will be released as driver 6.8. 6.7.191 is its first release candidate.

With RandR-1.2 support, you get mode auto-detection and so, as in the Intel driver 2.x. So you may clean your xorg.conf as described here. If you don't get your desired resolution at startup, see here. However, the old dual-head support code (zaphod) is dead, so some people might have to get used to xrandr instead.

Several people will also be happy that the GATOS TV-output support code has been merged and improved to support more cards. You will see a S-video output and you can enable it as usual with xrandr. Not sure how well tested it has been, but at least it seems to work fine on my rv370 (Mobility X300).

Don't forget that this is a release candidate. I personally consider the code as highly experimental since I seem to get more GPU lockups when playing xmoto than in 6.6.193. The code is still under heavy development. Multiple ATI boards have strange behaviors that may not be supported yet (but it shouldn't be worse than in 6.6.193). Fortunately, upstream people are very responsive and doing a great job at fixing bugs, so feel free to ping them on IRC or report a bug directly on http://bugzilla.freedesktop.org.

The package is in now in debian experimental. But the Xserver release candidate is there too. So you will need to upgrade xserver-xorg-core too. If you don't want to do so, just rebuild the driver against unstable, you should just need to downgrade xserver-xorg-dev build-depend to 1.3.0 or so.