General Procedure to get ATI/DRI card running?

[Ben Scott]

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 6:30 PM, Labitt, Bruce
<labittb1 at tycoelectronics.com> wrote:
> In any case, first I'd like to take a look at finding more current xorg.

  If you try and replace the X-related packages provided by the
distro, you'll probably end up having to rebuild practically every
X-based package on the system.  They will all depend on the X
libraries.  You'd basically be recompiling the entire distro (minus
stuff that doesn't use X).

  So if you want to have a go at upgrading X, I would suggest doing a
parallel install of the X server into a different directory (e.g.
/usr/X11R7.4/ or /usr/local/X11/ or something like that).  You should,
in theory, be able to run a newer X server, while having all the X
clients use the libraries shipped with the distribution.  The X
protocol is known for being fairly backwards compatible.

  That might get messy for DRI (accelerated 3D) stuff, though.  I have
no idea how DRI works internally, but the "Direct Rendering" part of
the name would seem to suggest version differences might matter more.
:)

> xorg is not particularly simple to figure out what to do.

  I've never had to build X, but from what I've been told, it's one of
the more challenging things to do.

-- Ben