I have recently installed SuSE 9.1 Pro (first Linux distribution I’ve tried) and have a couple of problems:

1. For some reason the sound emulator is attempting to capture audio from the same ports on my soundcard as it outputs. This has so far been solved by simply disabling the audio capture from my card. Would this also be solved by finding different drivers/emulators?

2. Actually the more pressing problem is that no matter what it refuses to enable the 3D acceleration for my Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB graphics card. Oddly so far I have had the most success using the procedure here in the Suse 9.1 and ATI Radeon 9800 pro thread (I'd link but need four more posts after this one), however Sax2 refused to recognize my 3d support on my card and while Tux Racer worked fine, 3Ddiag said that I did not have a card capable of using 3D acceleration too.

I have tried both the 3.12.0 and 3.14.0(the newest) SuSE drivers for ATI.
I have so far been unable to get glxinfo or glxgears to even run much less tell me any thing.

I have also tried these also with less success:
the SuSE support forum thread "9800 Pro, enable 3d/opengl" (5th or 6th post down) the standard SuSE instructions and also the ATI instructions.

Is there a way to force hardware 3D acceleration (as I KNOW my card does it) or to cause Sax to actually recognize the hardware support for 3D acceleration? Or that failing how do I get the tools.

Also the instructions that worked best for me actually (maybe because I are ) also screwed up the auto mounting of my CDs/DVDs. Did I screw it up by accident or does (I remember having to recompile one of the options back into the kernel in order to get it to work - something about subfs not being supported in the kernel when I watched the boot info.

I have currently reinstalled SuSE about 8 or 9 times in order to try different combinations of methods with the default and updated kernels.

Here’s the basic specs of my system if it helps
AMD Athlon XP 2700
Gigabyte KT600 Mainboard
512 RAM
200 GB hard drive ( w/ 10 GB XP pro partition)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB on board RAM
Creative Sound Blaster Live!

EDIT - it's reinstalling after my last failed attempt - I'll post the kernel version and lsbin as soon as I have them.

If you are using XFree86 >4.3, fglrx won't really work.
If you are using X.org > 6.7, fglrx won't really work.
According to ATI, they are making new drivers for Linux.

I, however, will NEVER buy an ATI product for the rest of my life. Unless, you know, things really change.