General Procedure to get ATI/DRI card running?

[Labitt, Bruce]

Umm, thanks for your frank assessment. 

So which is the lesser of evils - using the AMD/ATI proprietary drivers
for 3D, or totally rebuilding my system from the ground up?  I presume
that I will still have to mess around to get things going.  I've fooled
around with this a few days now, I don't like wasting my time - I have
plenty to do.  

If I were to do this from the ground up, which distro to choose?  Why
slackware?  Why not Gentoo?  I suppose I can have a daily overnight
update and recompile everything for the morning.  

I had originally wanted a relatively stable system.  It appears I can't
get any work done with a stable system :(

Any other solutions available?  Second opinion?  Anyone?

Bruce

-----Original Message-----
From: Coleman Kane [mailto:cokane at cokane.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 4:37 PM
To: Labitt, Bruce
Cc: Arc Riley; gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
Subject: RE: General Procedure to get ATI/DRI card running?

On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 16:19 -0400, Labitt, Bruce wrote:
> Arc led me to believe that I did not have to do that yet.  He said
that
> the drm did not support radeonhd yet.
> 
> Believe me, this is more complicated than I had anticipated... :)
> 
> Here is the logfile
> 

First of all, I can tell just by looking at this log output that you are
in for a long headache. Your X server is over 2 years old, and won't be
able to support DRI on the radeonhd. Your X server might not even
support AIGLX on many of the drivers that will work with its older DRI
implementation today.

The latest X server is v1.4.1, and you are using v1.1.1. The oldest one
that will support DRI using radeonhd is v1.4.99.something, from the v1.5
snapshots branch in the xorg-server git repository.

Basically, you are trying to use a brand new driver for a brand new
piece of hardware with an ancient installation of X-Windows. If your
distro at least had a v1.4+ X-server, you might be able to get by just
by rebuilding about five modules.

Likely, you will need to rebuild almost all of X from scratch, and try
to make sure that it doesn't accidentally bring in headers from the old
X installation.

IOW, to get it working on your system, you are in for a wild ride. It is
probably easier to just install Slackware and start from scratch.

Furthermore, if you do get all of the latest X stuff, you'll need to
disable 2D acceleration in order to allow 3D acceleration to work on the
latest driver IIRC.

I strongly suggest you get in touch with the radeonhd mailing list as
well.

> X Window System Version 7.1.1
> Release Date: 12 May 2006
> X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0, Release 7.1.1
> Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.18-8.1.8.el5 x86_64 Red Hat, Inc.
> Current Operating System: Linux xxx.xxxx.xxx 2.6.18-92.1.6.el5xen #1
SMP
> Wed Jun 25 12:56:52 EDT 2008 x86_64
> Build Date: 12 June 2008
> Build ID: xorg-x11-server 1.1.1-48.41.el5_2.1 
> 	Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org
> 	to make sure that you have the latest version.
> Module Loader present
> Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting,
> 	(++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational,
> 	(WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
> (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Wed Jul  9 15:02:06 2008