Borderlands 2 on Fedora - Dell Studio XPS 16

The default driver for the Radeon HD 4670 card in my laptop is the Xorg Radeon driver.   Radeon support is rather hit or miss thanks to ATI/AMD.
I installed Fedora 17 x86_64, updated everything, installed wine (and all the associated i686 associated files.)  I then installed a Trial version of Codeweaver's crossover (crossover-11.2.1-1.i386.rpm).  After installing Steam in its own bottle (XP), and then downloading and running Borderlands 2 (actually you have to copy Borderlands2.exe over Launcher.exe to work around an annoying dotNet think) I would get weird error:
Your video card does not support alpha blending with floating point render targets (D3DFMT_A16B16G16R16F), which is required to run this game. Exitting...
which it turns out was due to the apparent patent restrictions on the algorithm and since Fedora is based in the US, the mesa libs are compiled without that.
Still wanting to see if I could get this to work I googled around and discovered that I could just rebuild the mesa libs with it on:

(umask 022; sudo yum install cups-libs)
(umask 022; sudo yum install rpmdevtools)
(umask 022; sudo yum install gsm-devel libv4l libXXinelibXinerama libxslt openssl glibc-devel gcc gcc-c++)
yumdownloader --source mesa-libGL
rpmdev-setuptree
rpm -Uvh mesa-7.11.2-3.fc16.src.rpm
(umask 022; sudo yum-builddep mesa-7.11.2-3.fc16.src.rpm)
(umask 022; sudo yum install gcc-c++)
vi SPECS/mesa.spec
     ## add the --enable-texture-float to configure
rpmbuild -ba SPECS/mesa.spec




Of course since this was Fedora x86_64 I had to find a way to get mesa compiled for i686 (wine relies on the i686 files after all.) I dorked with mock for a while but found it was faster to just install VirtualBox, install Fedora 17 i686 and repeat the above procedure.

After all was said and done, and the appropriate
sudo yum localinstall
was done, I was able to run Steam again, and get all the way to the main screen of Borderlands 2.  Sadly, there is still something weird about the setup because all of the main game colors are blacked out.  I decided I had worked enough and gave up for now.
I think this is mainly an ATI failing since I can run the game under Crossover at work on my HP Desktop with Nvidia card.

Now, the final point, I did try many versions of the fglrx driver (the proprietary ATI one) which got me to the 2k screen but would hang.  Due to the whole catalyst driver situation with older Radeon cards, I also install Fedora 15 (32 + 64) and Fedora 16 (32 + 64) versions with the same result.  Sadness.

My biggest take away is that my next laptop will have an Nvidia chipset.

Comments

  1. ChediMay 4, 2013 at 1:36:00 PM CDT

    Just for information, you can compile i686 rpms on x86_64 linux by adding --target=i686 to the rpmbuild command:

    rpmbuild --target=i686 -ba SPECS/mesa.spec

    ReplyDelete

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