ATI fglrx and XGL (Has anyone got this to work yet ?)
 

PLEASE ONLY REPLY IF YOU CURRENTLY HAVE XGL RUNNING ON ATI with the PROPRIETARY FGLRX DRIVER, there seems to be alot of misleading information floating about about this issue. I would just like to know if someone has it working with either 'compiz' or 'beryl'. If so could you please put a link to any information that is reliable or just which distro and ATI card you have this working on. NO THEORIES please just tried and tested methods. I and so many others would really appreciate it and Thank you in advance.

You cannot have compiz and DRI with fglrx. This is because the proprietary ATI driver doesn't support the composite extension. Most people use compositing with xgl when they have an ATI graphics card.

What is misleading about that?

Like said.

Here's a good starting point if you like Beryl:
http://www.beryl-project.org/distros.php

Note the "howto install" links. When you install fglrx you don't get out of it without having DRI, but to get DRI working you'll need to disable composite extension from your X. That's pretty clearly said I think. The other option is to have composite extension enabled and not have DRI. Third option is to have two X servers configured and used when needed: one with fglrx+DRI enabled, without composite, and one with composite and without DRI -- I don't see any reason to use fglrx+DRI, though, unless you play 3d games or do some mad 3d modeling, and in those cases I see no reason to use composite :)

EDIT: this whole composite-3d-drivers-direct-rendering stuff is pretty confusing. I've found myself several times now thinking I know how it works, and the next time I go about installing either Beryl or Compiz the way I like I always find myself wondering why the setup doesn't work. It seems the instructions that work for one setup don't work for another one; I'm sorry if you've got a misleading picture of this, and I hope things change in the future so that people could get that kind of stuff work more easily, but as of now it's easier to not try get everything possible at once..just decide what you want exactly and locate instructions for that. If you really do want both 3d desktop effects trough composite and ATI's proprietary drivers enabled direct rendering, consider having two X server configurations that you can more or less easily switch when needed.

DRI ? who cares
 

Thx for replies. I have had this completely upside down.

GLX is the OpenGL interface for 3D modelling on X, such things as 3D desktops(compiz) and games

DRI is a Direct Rendering Infrastructure which is an added feature of ATI cards to give Xorg Direct Access to graphics Hardware.

Although these are different things, You cant have GLX support without DRI on ATI cards with the proprietary drivers. So which video driver are you supposed to use with XGL ?

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=739758
http://nicofo.tuxfamily.org/dotclear...eryl-on-fedora
http://polishlinux.org/choose/compar...istro2=Zenwalk
Read carefully... again, this is all non-ambiguous.

Hi all !

For those who already read my previous post, I just edit it now by replacing it completely because ... it works now :D

So, now I have Ubuntu 6.10, the latest proprietary driver 8.14.something from ATI and the latest Beryl SVN.

These are my repos :
I installed my ubuntu, made the full update after I adapted my sources.list

Then I did the installation of the ATI driver following this HOWTO : http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubu...allation_Guide (you'll need to add the lines for Composite and AIGLX in the xorg.conf at the end of the installation, because for some reason it disappears if you did it in the beginning)

This is my xorg.conf after ATI driver installation :
Then I did the installation of Beryl (note that I first installed the latest stable version of beryl, which means without the SVN repos, and that didn't work and gave the same problem as with generic drivers, it gave a white screen on loading beryl, so I updated Beryl after that... maybe first installing the stable version helped)

Here's the HOWTO I used (skip the driver part, get directly to the beryl installation) :
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=291464

There was a discussion about the installation and support (I tried to install this on SUSE 10.2 but it is not SUSE specific problem).

I have put there the steps which way I installed the driver - including patch and so on.

You can download the tar.bz2 file unpack it and rebuild the driver yourself. Let me know if it worked or any help was needed.

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=257060