radeon driver. 3D in three distros, not in Suse??
 

Hi there

I'm at a loss to understand where I'm going wrong trying to get 3D effects under Suse. I'm putting this in the 'General' section though as other distros are involved....

I've tried EVERYTHING to get 3D effects on my Compaq Presario R3000 laptop under Suse. I've read pretty much every page google throws up on this and have had hours and hours of work attempting to use the ATi driver. However, on trying new distros, I find that I don't need the Ati driver - the radeon one works fine.

I tried Fedora 7 and 3D effects worked 'out of the box'. I tried Ubuntu and again, enabling 3D gave the wobbly windows immediately. (Strangely, I couldn't get this to work in Kubuntu - no idea why!)

I wondered if this was a Gnome v KDE issue, but having recently installed PClinuxOS with KDE I was amazed that with Beryl installed I could have some fantastic windows effects - wobbly windows, cube, etc

In PClinuxOS the driver is listed as 'radeon (3D support)', but in Suse I find that it is given as 'radeon (No 3D support).

What is going on here!
Obviously I can use the native radeon driver to get full 3D effects (as PClinux does), or I can use whatever Ubuntu and Fedora 7 install as standard. I've tried the Ati driver, and no matter how accurately I follow every single install guide, the net result is always the same - the X session crashes and I end up back in text mode.

My graphics card is an onboard AT1 mobility Radeon 9100IGP and here is the relevent section from my xorg.conf file:


So, can anyone tell me where I'm going wrong with Suse? What changes do I need to get 3D in Suse with the radeon driver?
Please don't recommend the ATi driver as that just doesn't work on my laptop.

Thanks!

I've just rebooted in PClinuxOS and the driver is different. Here is the xorg.conf details:

How do I use this driver in Suse then??

The open source drivers may be refered to as either "ati" or "radeon". I think the "radeon" driver only works for Radeons, while the "ati" driver works with other Ati cards also. In any case, I've never had changing "ati" vs "radeon" affect whether or not 3d was working (for a radeon card).

To figure out what's going on, we'll need more of the xorg.conf files. You definitely have the right idea going for the open source driver instead of the official one. I think the official driver only supports radeon 9200 and up.

If you've already attempted to install the official ati driver, then it might be best to simplifiy things with a clean reinstall rather than try and clean up the official ati driver from your system.

In my experience, the option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps" needs to be set in order to get Beryl working properly, but even without that option most 3d will work properly. In any case, use the utility "glxinfo" to determine whether or not direct rendering is enabled. Some 3d programs to test things out with other than Beryl include glxgears and 3d screensavers.

Thanks for the answer.

This is a fresh suse install, so no problem with my previous ATi driver attempts! I put a new hard drive in my laptop (a big one!) and decided to try several distros. Suse (my main distro for the past year or so) was the only one not to give 3D! The native Linux driver certainly seems to be the way to go as I now know that it works on my laptop - whereas the ATi one never did.

I tried glxgears and was very surprised to see some gears - I never managed that before on my old install! Howevr, they are slow:

The glxinfo command gives Mesa as the driver which is no good for 3d - is that right?

Is this print out useful?

The really useful line is "direct rendering: No". That means that you don't have hardware acceleration working. You also correctly deduced that from the fact that it's using mesa.

Posting the contents of /etc/X11/xorg.conf may reveal something obvious which is missing. I'd be a little surprised if any of the obvious things are missing, though.

You can try replacing "radeon" with "ati" to see if that has any effect (a quick way to restart X is ctrl-alt-backspace). I've never fixed or broken direct rendering by switching between "radeon" and "ati", but it can't hurt to try it.

I replaced 'radeon' with 'ati' (worth a go!) but no changes found. Here is xorg.conf:

Thanks

Is that a cut-and-paste? No typos? Because having a DRI mode of 0660 instead of 0666 is weird to me. I've also never seen the Group "video" line before.

It seems to me that SUSE has things set up so that only users in the "video" group are allowed to access DRI. Other distributions simply let every user access DRI by setting the permissions to 0666.

Possibly, the regular user you're logged in as isn't a member of the "video" group. So, you can add this user to the "video" group, or you can edit xorg.conf to change the permissions to 0666. Or both, I guess.

See if that has any effect.

Hi there - thanks for continuing to help me, much appreciated. :)

The above listing is a cut and paste, but I was logged on as root at the time.

I am a member of the "video" group, but I followed your suggestion to change 0660 to 0666. It didn't make any difference though as according to my "My computer" screen, I'm still using the driver "radeon (No 3D support)".


Thanks

I'm not familiar with that "My Computer" screen. It seems a little strange that it would report you using the "radeon" driver when your xorg.conf is using the "ati" driver (not that this has ever made a difference in my experience).

One thing that MIGHT have an effect is to reduce the default color depth to 16. While I've never heard of this being a limitation on Ati cards, I know that old Intel graphics would only have 3d acceleration if the resolution was at most 1024x768 and the color depth was at most 16bit.

I don't think this is the problem though as this exact same laptop gives 3D with other Distros! In PCLinuxOS it runs beautifully with transparency, cubes, snapping windows etc, all at decent speed. The graphics card works... but not with Suse!

The 'My Computer' screen can be seen here: My Computer

(PS I just clicked the link to check it was there and realised i forgot to compress the image - it is under 2MB though)