Video

The purpose of this page is to give you streamlined steps for setting up your video hardware for X, and desktop environments such as GNOME.

   Important

Editors: OK, I've decided to change the plans for this page. This is going to be a page similar to Subarches. The idea is to help people to identify their hardware and guide them toward the correct driver for their chipset. The focus will be primarily on defining the types of hardware that are supported, what products they appear in, and how to know if you have this hardware, and also give people good general overview of options available to them (free vs. proprietary, etc.) Other important topics that apply to all drivers, like eselect opengl should be covered as well. This will then serve as the meta-page for Video support, with individual ebuild pages holding the details for each driver.

Video Drivers

First determine which video card you have and which driver it requires.

root # lspci -nn | grep -i vga

to see what your system is using:

root # lspci -k

Once hardware is determined use the following sections to add or edit the VIDEO_CARDS global variable in /etc/make.conf. For more granular details including kernel configurations, frame buffer settings, and xorg configurations: see specific package page links.

AMD/ATI

Users can choose between free (x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati) and proprietary (x11-drivers/ati-drivers) video drivers. x11-drivers/ati-drivers supports a variety AMD products, including Radeon R9, R7, R5 and HD 5000 Series through HD 8000 Series. Also supported are AMD A-Series APUs and Mobile Radeon HD chipsets. The free x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati has an official hardware and feature compatibility matrix. The free drivers are recommended as the proprietary drivers are not currently maintained very well by AMD.

Intel

The Intel video driver (No results supports Intel GMA and Intel HD graphics processors, which are found in laptops and desktop systems.

NVIDIA

Users can choose between x11-drivers/xf86-video-nouveau and proprietary x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers video drivers released by NVIDIA. The proprietary drivers have a reputation for quality, although they are often not updated to work with the latest versions of X or the Linux kernel.

VESA/VGA

No results

Video Driver Installation and Setup

Individual driver pages cover specific setup steps for each driver. The general process is as follows:

1. Define VIDEO_CARDS variable in /etc/make.conf to refer to the name of the driver that you wish to use. Special names, rather than ebuild package names are used. For example, fglrx is used to refer to x11-drivers/ati-drivers.
2. Update your system using emerge, if X is already installed, or emerge xorg-x11. Your VIDEO_CARDS settings will result in your selected drivers being installed.
3. Configure X to use these drivers. This often involves running X -configure or using a supplied tool to produce an initial X configuration like aticonfig --initial.
4. If necessary (this is typically done automatically for you,) run eselect opengl and eselect opencl to set the working OpenGL and OpenCL implementation.