2008 / 01 / 28

Fedora 8 on the Koolu Ion A603

Fedora install

Fedora 8 installs on the Koolu Ion A603 without any problem as long as you select a text install (add the line "text" to your kickstart config file), and detects correctly the AMD Geode LX chip, but will unfortunately be unable to start X (the X Window system) due to the fact that the driver in Fedora 8 is old and buggy.

ion A603 with a PLAYMOBIL® and a Lego®

Recompiling amd_drv.so

There are drivers available on koolu.org, but I was unable to make them function with Fedora 8, even after re-compiling the source ones. In the end I had to get a newer version from X.org and compile it which resulted in a working X with 16 bit colour depth instead of 8. Additionally, once re-installed with Fedora 8, the problem of "redraw lag" described by David Llewellyn-Jones in his article about the Koolu Ion A603 disappeared, which I assume is due to the newer AMD driver, rather than the different distro. Ubuntu users might want to look at upgrading their driver too.

First, you need to install some development packages:


yum install gcc xorg-x11-server-sdk

Obtain the AMD Geode driver from http://wiki.x.org/wiki/AMDGeodeDriver, page down to the "download" section and choose the latest version from the tarball area, e.g. in late January 2008, the version 2.7.7.6:


wget http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/driver/xf86-video-amd-2.7.7.6.tar.bz2

Untar, and build (make sure you are on the Koolu Ion A603):


tar jxvf xf86-video-amd-2.7.7.6.tar.bz2
cd xf86-video-amd-2.7.7.6
./configure
make

Install the new driver

You should now have an amd_drv.so file, it will be in a different directory depending on the version of the driver, in ./src in the earlier versions, in ./src/.libs in the newer versions. Use this file to replace the original:


cd /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers
mv amd_drv.so amd_drv.so.original
cp -p ~/xf86-video-amd-2.7.7.6/src/.libs/amd_drv.so .
chmod a+rx amd_drv.so

X will now work, but you will probably need to tweak your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Check the xorg.conf version provided on koolu.org, specifically the "Module" section.