AMD continues to abide by their commitment to provide open-source support for their graphics cards and as proof of that this afternoon they have released their initial hardware acceleration code that supports the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" family of graphics processors.

"Timothy Normand Miller of the Open Graphics Project is looking for help with their effort to design hardware -- particularly wireless and graphics cards -- with fully published design documents [...] It's a big project and there are many different ways to help, but the immediate need is for someone to clean up the text on their wiki, both to improve the organization of the information there and t

Board and chipmaker Via is gearing up toward releasing Linux driver source code and product documentation for its popular x86-compatible chipsets and peripherals. The company has launched a website where Ubuntu 8.04 and SUSE 10 binary graphics drivers can be downloaded, with source code and documentation to follow, it says.

There are several different drivers available for various ATI graphics cards in Mandriva Linux 2008 that may be of interest in certain situations. This entry concerns the free software set of drivers. Some notes on the proprietary drivers may be found further down this document.

The open-source Avivo driver is currently bound to supporting the ATI R500 GPU family and with efforts now being focused on the RadeonHD driver, this reverse-engineered driver will likely never support the newer GPUs (The Death Of The R500 Avivo Driver). However, the RadeonHD driver that was pushed out into the public a few hours ago does support the R600 series.

We need to give ATI some bad press. Unlike NVIDIA, they refuse to provide driver support for GNU/Linux. They can't continue to get away with this: Many Windows users are starting to want GNU/Linux compatible hardware, because they have "the switch" in mind.