I'm at my wit's end here. I have an IBM T60p with an ATI FireGL v5200 graphics card, I'm running kubuntu 10.04, and the radeon open source drivers for the graphics card. 3D works great when I run glxgears. I can even use wine to open Guild Wars--the login screen works great. The character select screen works wonderfully. The actual game...looks like something the cat yakked up. I get a completely white screen, with only bright red, yellow, and black edges. As if someone took the background or the pictures and posterized them. The UI overlays look and work fine, as does the full screen travel map. I can see character names, and even player dialogues. Just not the toons or the backgrounds.
All the searching I've done seems to indicate that this particular card fell through the cracks--that it's not supported by the ATI linux drivers--in fact, it really seems like ATI is hoping it just dies in a fire somewhere. ATI cards don't seem too popular with Wine anyway...am I left with no other recourse, then?
Anyone with any help, tips, or pointers has my deepest thanks.
Jen
ATI FireGL v5200 and Guild Wars
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Angus Hedger
- Level 1
- Posts: 8
- Joined: Thu Aug 19, 2010 10:32 am
I have good news, bad news, and very ugly news.
First of all, it IS supported by fglrx, its basically a x1600.
First lot of bad news, they dropped support for those cards back with catalyst 9.3, which only supports xorg7.4/ x-server 1.5.x, and unless you want to go retro with your xorg, it just isnt going to work
Clicky: Heres the driver if you feel like using a distro from feb 2009..
2nd lot of bad news, the OSS drivers, ie the radeon one, with Mesa, generally suck hard for wine, you are luck that it works at all.
The kinda ugly news, you MAY be able to get it going.
Now, a few notes before we start, first of all these sets may nuke your wineprefix (thats your .wine folder) ie make it unstable/etc, to fix it you may need to give it a good rm-rf'ing, (aka delete it) so be warned that you may lose other programs/configs you have done in wine.
Maybe make a new wine prefix, maybe make a backup of your .wine folder, just be warned!
First first of all, tell wine to run programs in a virtual desktop, you can do this in the grathics tab in winecfg, set it to your screen size, or whatever you size you want.
You can also do this on a per app basis via the command line, eg
$ wine explorer /desktop=800x600 gw.exe
will run guildwars in a 800x600 virtual desktop.
If that makes everything work, then ignore the rest of this very long post and have fun ig
First of all, you need to turn of GLSL, as your drive has no hope in hell of working with it.
Clicky here and grab this
Now you have winetricks, make it executable and run it, from the window that loads up, select glsl-disable.
Once that has run, give it a try, if the gods of OSS drivers like you, the stars may align and things may work, if not, lets keep trying.
Try running guildwars with the -dx8 command line switch.
eg, from inside the folder that has the gw.exe
$ wine gw.exe -dx8
if that works, woo!
if not, lets keep going.
now lets try
$ wine gw.exe -noshaders -dx8
works? Woo!
No help? Boo! lets keep going
run winecfg from the terminal, and go to the Grathics tab, and untick "Allow Pixel Shaders"
Try now, if no help, go back into winecfg and the grathics tab and set "Vertex shader support" to none, and try again.
If its still not working, you can try running winetricks and choosing the d3dx9 option and seeing if that helps.
If it still wont work, then it seems you need to
1) try updating your grathics drivers, maybe theres a PPA or you can try kubuntu 10.10
if that doesnt help, or if you dont want to (dont blame you)
Then it seems that you are out of luck
First of all, it IS supported by fglrx, its basically a x1600.
First lot of bad news, they dropped support for those cards back with catalyst 9.3, which only supports xorg7.4/ x-server 1.5.x, and unless you want to go retro with your xorg, it just isnt going to work
Clicky: Heres the driver if you feel like using a distro from feb 2009..
2nd lot of bad news, the OSS drivers, ie the radeon one, with Mesa, generally suck hard for wine, you are luck that it works at all.
The kinda ugly news, you MAY be able to get it going.
Now, a few notes before we start, first of all these sets may nuke your wineprefix (thats your .wine folder) ie make it unstable/etc, to fix it you may need to give it a good rm-rf'ing, (aka delete it) so be warned that you may lose other programs/configs you have done in wine.
Maybe make a new wine prefix, maybe make a backup of your .wine folder, just be warned!
First first of all, tell wine to run programs in a virtual desktop, you can do this in the grathics tab in winecfg, set it to your screen size, or whatever you size you want.
You can also do this on a per app basis via the command line, eg
$ wine explorer /desktop=800x600 gw.exe
will run guildwars in a 800x600 virtual desktop.
If that makes everything work, then ignore the rest of this very long post and have fun ig
First of all, you need to turn of GLSL, as your drive has no hope in hell of working with it.
Clicky here and grab this
Now you have winetricks, make it executable and run it, from the window that loads up, select glsl-disable.
Once that has run, give it a try, if the gods of OSS drivers like you, the stars may align and things may work, if not, lets keep trying.
Try running guildwars with the -dx8 command line switch.
eg, from inside the folder that has the gw.exe
$ wine gw.exe -dx8
if that works, woo!
if not, lets keep going.
now lets try
$ wine gw.exe -noshaders -dx8
works? Woo!
No help? Boo! lets keep going
run winecfg from the terminal, and go to the Grathics tab, and untick "Allow Pixel Shaders"
Try now, if no help, go back into winecfg and the grathics tab and set "Vertex shader support" to none, and try again.
If its still not working, you can try running winetricks and choosing the d3dx9 option and seeing if that helps.
If it still wont work, then it seems you need to
1) try updating your grathics drivers, maybe theres a PPA or you can try kubuntu 10.10
if that doesnt help, or if you dont want to (dont blame you)
Then it seems that you are out of luck
Thank you so much for the simplified response I can understand. I was researching and my head started swimming with xorg configs, ATI-is-now-AMD, and all sorts of other stuff that made me want to put my head in a bucket of real wine.
I'm going to start going down your path shortly. I'll report back what I find. Thank you so much again!
I'm going to start going down your path shortly. I'll report back what I find. Thank you so much again!
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Angus Hedger
- Level 1
- Posts: 8
- Joined: Thu Aug 19, 2010 10:32 am
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Angus Hedger
- Level 1
- Posts: 8
- Joined: Thu Aug 19, 2010 10:32 am
Oh darn, I forgot a few other things!
1) run $ wineserver -version
if it doesnt say wine 1.3.8 or 1.2.2 you should update
see here about how todo that: clicky
2) run $ glxinfo | grep "direct rendering"
it should come up with,
direct rendering: Yes
if it doesn't, then you have a driver problem, which needs looking into, if this is the case let us know and ill look into the right steps to try and fix it!
1) run $ wineserver -version
if it doesnt say wine 1.3.8 or 1.2.2 you should update
see here about how todo that: clicky
2) run $ glxinfo | grep "direct rendering"
it should come up with,
direct rendering: Yes
if it doesn't, then you have a driver problem, which needs looking into, if this is the case let us know and ill look into the right steps to try and fix it!
Okay, status report...
Turned of glsl - no love
ran with -dx8 - no love there, either
turned off pixelshaders - no love, but at least I wasn't all white anymore--I had some green and a little more definition.
I also installed PlayOnLinux and tried Wine 1.1.44 (nothing happened at all), 1.2.2 (the usual white-screen-with-blotches) and 1.3.8 (same as 1.2.2) so my wine version seems to be less of a problem.
glxgears works great so I know I *can* do 3d rendering.
At this point, through the experiments and my in-house tech support (the mister), we're pretty sure it's the driver.
So this morning, the mister is putting windows back on it. We're going to use a dual-boot with the windows there as backup/benchmark, and then I'm going to make a fresh install of 10.10 (either kubuntu or ubuntu--any guesses which will turn out better?) and start again from there.
If 10.10 doesn't work, I might go back to 9.10. With the windows dual-boot, I'll have a sandbox partition to play around with.
Once again, thank you so much for your help. I suspect next time I shop for a laptop, I'm going to make sure I've got an nvidia card in it.
Jen
Turned of glsl - no love
ran with -dx8 - no love there, either
turned off pixelshaders - no love, but at least I wasn't all white anymore--I had some green and a little more definition.
I also installed PlayOnLinux and tried Wine 1.1.44 (nothing happened at all), 1.2.2 (the usual white-screen-with-blotches) and 1.3.8 (same as 1.2.2) so my wine version seems to be less of a problem.
glxgears works great so I know I *can* do 3d rendering.
At this point, through the experiments and my in-house tech support (the mister), we're pretty sure it's the driver.
So this morning, the mister is putting windows back on it. We're going to use a dual-boot with the windows there as backup/benchmark, and then I'm going to make a fresh install of 10.10 (either kubuntu or ubuntu--any guesses which will turn out better?) and start again from there.
If 10.10 doesn't work, I might go back to 9.10. With the windows dual-boot, I'll have a sandbox partition to play around with.
Once again, thank you so much for your help. I suspect next time I shop for a laptop, I'm going to make sure I've got an nvidia card in it.
Jen
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Angus Hedger
- Level 1
- Posts: 8
- Joined: Thu Aug 19, 2010 10:32 am
Im sorry to hear you cant get it going.
That is the problem with the OSS drivers, they are great for everything apart from gaming in general, wine even more so (you generally need to chuck a lot of power at it).
It looks like Ubuntu 9.10 ie karmic shipped with xorg7.4, and a version of the fglrx driver old enough to support your GPU, so you may have some luck.
If the version packaged is to old or to new, you may need to install it yourself, which will be a pain, but is doable.
Generally, if you are lucky you can just grab the driver from the link I provided earlier and follow the install guide and it should work.
Now, I am not sure if the performance with wine/guildwars will be any good, Im pretty sure you will need glsl off, but it should work.
Anyhow, best of luck! Hope you get things going!
That is the problem with the OSS drivers, they are great for everything apart from gaming in general, wine even more so (you generally need to chuck a lot of power at it).
It looks like Ubuntu 9.10 ie karmic shipped with xorg7.4, and a version of the fglrx driver old enough to support your GPU, so you may have some luck.
If the version packaged is to old or to new, you may need to install it yourself, which will be a pain, but is doable.
Generally, if you are lucky you can just grab the driver from the link I provided earlier and follow the install guide and it should work.
Now, I am not sure if the performance with wine/guildwars will be any good, Im pretty sure you will need glsl off, but it should work.
Anyhow, best of luck! Hope you get things going!
Jenjensoko wrote: Once again, thank you so much for your help. I suspect next time I shop for a laptop, I'm going to make sure I've got an nvidia card in it.
+1 to that comment. Macbook Air for X-mas anyone?
It doesn't really matter whether you use Kubuntu or Ubuntu. Personally I find Gnome a bit 'scrappy' (notification area - cough, cough) but each to their own!
Just be aware however that KVM (the window manager for KDE) has 'builtin' desktop effects like Compiz. As these utilise the graphics card it's important to turn these off completely in the main KDE System settings GUI (before trying any 3D games in Wine).
I think this the Personal Package Archive is the one that has the latest ATI display drivers (disclaimer: maybe):
PPA for bleeding edge Radeon gallium - mesa testing drivers
I installed these for someone else with a X1650 Pro desktop card. They didn't break his system (Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid). But he's not a gamer - so I can't comment on OpenGL performance...
Just remember it's important to make sure that you try some native Linux OpenGL 3D games before you start running 3D/DirectX Windows games via Wine!
I find Phoronix to be quite a useful source of background information about the problems you are experiencing. You know an overview - rather than wading through 200 page forum threads!! Just don't believe everything Michael Larabel says on his website (like Valve planning to release a native Linux version of their Steam client)...
I was using an X1950 Pro desktop graphics card around the time that ATI decided to drop support for all cards prior to the X2000 series! I feel your pain. Unfortunately you would have to go all the way back to (K)Ubuntu 8.04/8.10 to get a proprietary driver to work with your graphics card... I can report (accurately) that the ATI proprietary driver was rubbish at the time. I remember having to play Half-Life 2.0 forced into DirectX 8.0 mode...
I would agree with 'Mister' about dual-booting. An X1600 is a pretty decent gaming card under Windows. The open source drivers for the X1600 under Linux are very immature. However they progressing at phenomenal pace - since AMD/ATI started releasing details of their GPU API ~3 years ago. Give them another 2 years and who knows... You might be a notebook as an AMD graphics card!!
Bob
I used this exact setup for the last year or so and it's been like pulling teeth all the way. I have no idea how much time I've lost trying to get this thing to work properly on a CONSISTENT basis. I so feel your pain.Bob Wya wrote:...I would agree with 'Mister' about dual-booting. An X1600 is a pretty decent gaming card under Windows. The open source drivers for the X1600 under Linux are very immature. However they progressing at phenomenal pace - since AMD/ATI started releasing details of their GPU API ~3 years ago. Give them another 2 years and who knows... You might be a notebook as an AMD graphics card!!
Bob
Oh well. Here's to hoping the future brings better development.
