Here are some thoughts about the ATI and their drivers for linux:
1) First of all I believe the drivers are crappy all the way and that there is no serious support for linux from ATI
2) I have been trying for the last month to make these drivers work for me but everywhere I go there are problems:
- I use kernel26cko and ati-drivers from AUR and everything installed right but I get random lockupsif i use only fglrx. I tried to add to rc.conf before fglrx agpgart and via-agp which is my chipset and set internal to NO in xorg.conf and I have no 3D accelleration.
- I built my own 2.6.10 kernel succesfully at last and tried to compile the drivers. It compiles, again no 3d acceleration and I have found searching that the drivers require gcc 3.3.x to compile, while I have 3.4.x.During makepkg I found tha it compiles nvidia_agp instead of via_agp which is my chipset !!
3) I even tried the opensource with the latest kernel loading agpgart via-agp and radeon in rc-conf and modifying the xorg.conf according to a gentoo wiki page. Failed again...no 3D accelaration.
4) I quit trying. I will just wait and see if the new drivers (September??) wll have better support for my system.
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When I was using KANOTIX Kano had a great script install-radeon-debian.sh for installing Ati Drivers.If you change some lines in the script you can even use older drivers with all patches applied.
Because it is for debian it has to be modified by someone to be useful for Arch users.I can't do it because I am too newbie for it.
You can find it at:
http://kanotix.com/files/install-radeon-debian.sh
I use my own custom kernel...
]]>I think I may have found my problem however. I'm using the PCI version of the radeon 9250, because I have no AGP slot on my motherboard. Instead, I have a Intel Extreme Graphics onboard thing that takes its place. I can't disable it in the BIOS (on windows I just uninstalled the drivers) however I'm thinking there might be a conflict between this and the ATI card. Does anyone know how I can resolve this? (The chipset is an 845G)
]]>display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: Mesa project: www.mesa3d.org
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect
OpenGL version string: 1.2 (1.5 Mesa 6.2.1)
Why is mesa still loading? :cry:
]]>I blacklisted nvidia_agp in hotplug, just like you blacklisted via-agp, and I get the afore-mentioned errors.
there is nothing wrong with this. i don't see the reason why everybody's saying that all agp_ stuff should be compiled as modules and not used. i've built one of those into kernel (_intel), together with agpgart and it works perfectly.
]]>Michal Stanislawski
]]>(EE) fglrx(0): [agp] unable to acquire AGP, error "xf86_ENOMEM"
(EE) fglrx(0): cannot init AGP
And I have "useInternalAGP" set to "yes"... so, I guess that tells you which is better for me... heh.
-=edit=- dmesg output:
[fglrx] Maximum main memory to use for locked dma buffers: 428 MBytes.
[fglrx] module loaded - fglrx 8.14.13 [Jun 8 2005] on minor 0
[fglrx] AGP detected, AgpState = 0x00000000 (hardware caps of chipset)
[fglrx:firegl_unlock] *ERROR* Process 5172 using kernel context 0
[fglrx] AGP detected, AgpState = 0x00000000 (hardware caps of chipset)
[fglrx:firegl_unlock] *ERROR* Process 5314 using kernel context 0
-=edit again=- Just checked; don't have a process 5172, but process 5314 is X.
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About using the Agpgart. At first I noticed that after installing the ati drivers dmesg contained the following:
[fglrx] Internal AGP support requested, but kernel AGP support active.
[fglrx] Have to use kernel AGP support to avoid conflicts.
lsmod showed that via-agp was getting loaded even though I didn't explicitly specify it in rc.conf. I blacklisted it in the /etc/hotplug/blacklist and rebooted and finally internal agp support was active.:
[fglrx] AGP detected, AgpState = 0x1f000a07 (hardware caps of chipset)
[fglrx] AGP enabled, AgpCommand = 0x1f000304 (selected caps)
The question is which one is better? Any thoughts?
Michal Stanislawski
]]>However I was looking at the kernel in the PKGBUILD and changed it around, my uname -r shows the kernel as 2.6.12-ARCH
What is the 2.6.12-cko2-swsusp2 and would that matter?
I made my own kernel as the wiki tells to do it...