mylde: The fglrx drivers only support Radeon 8500 up to 9800. So you have to stick with drivers from the DRI-project to get 3D-support on a Radeon 7000. I have a Radeon 7200 myself and even if it's slow it works pretty well and I can even play some games on it with decent speed. My 8500 is driven by the fglrx driver and it's much faster though.

Guru3: You should be ok with recompiling kernel and separate kernelmodules only. I don't think module-init-tools and other userspace things like the iptables tools needs to be that recent.

Ok, I don't care much of the 3d side. The important thing is to get tv-out working. What is the trick with that on radeon 7000 ? Gatos ?

At the moment I can't get X up when tv-out is connected. X gives and error that only 640x480-0x0 resolutions are supported. With fglrx drivers the tv-out problem would have solved but if I can't use it what now ?

mylde: I think you should be able to use either the GATOS theater_out support (http://gatos.sourceforge.net/theater_out.php) or boot up in VESA mode. The GATOS driver seems to be locked and 800x600 and VESA at 640x480 though. With GATOS your monitor must also support 50 or 60 Hz depending on the TV-standard you use. I think the card should send a signal in VESA-mode to both the monitor and TV if both are connected when you boot the machine. To use X in VESA-mode you need to change the driver in your config to Driver "vesa" instead of Driver "radeon".

I don't use a monitor myself though, just a TV, so I don't know exactly how this works with both but check the link above for more info. The reason I use GATOS is just to get both TV-out and 3D but the VESA-mode is fine if I don't need 3D. 640x480 is also enough for me since the machine is totally dedicated to playing music and movies.

Oops

I'm installing GATOS but I ran into problems again. If I want to get tv-out working I must use the devel version of gatos and compile myself against xfree86 source. Because I'm using debian and have installed X via apt-get I don't have any sources.

I tried to do apt-get sources xfree86 but I don't know what to do then.

I'm wondering if there is some binaries of development version which I could just unpack like the "stable" version?

mylde: I guess you might have some luck though because I have binaries built just for Debian. If your card is supported by GATOS theater_out and you have the package dependencies met on your system you should be able to install and use my DEB's. It took me more than 6 hours to build them from source. That's why I still keep them around.

I run the unstable branch of Debian though so you might have to upgrade some stuff. I'll send you a PM later with a location of the binaries (can't take too much load on the server so I don't want to make it public here).

mylde: Uh, I forgot something... GATOS doesn't support Linux 2.6 yet because of the drm-kernel-module. I guess they'll port it sooner or later but it's not done yet so on 2.6 you're stuck with VESA-mode at the moment. I want to upgrade my mediaserver myself since it's the only machine left here without 2.6 but we'll have to wait and see. Do you still want the binaries?

Yes, please :P I´ll swith back to 2.4.20 if I have to.

How did you create those files ? I got stuck with xfree and didn't know where to go from there

Anyways I'm using unstable version too and I'll update it atleast once a day so those debs should work. Also I remember reading that drm-kernel module is only needed for 3d acceleration not with tv-out, well if that isn't the case i'll go back to 2.4.20 kernel and wait for an update.

I have pretty bad memory sometimes so I wrote a small README with instructions to myself in case I would have to do it again. You'll see it in the top directory when you get the files.

Hmm. I couldn't send PM's to you (it said permission denied). Well here's the link anyway. I guess the internet link would die before the server can get too overloaded because it's damn slow. I'm off to bed now so happy downloading. It might take a while.

http://www.jownix.dyndns.org/pub/xfree86-theater_out/

I couldn't even get the 3.7 drivers installed...sure they fixed the installation bugs from the old versions...but I got a GPL error...(which I think means uncompatable kernel) so I gave up and installed 3.2.8..which so far I am not very happy with, sometimes the 3D will suddenly decide to turn off (not in the middle of a game...but when one doesn't exit properly, forcing me to reset my machinde (the power button way ) then I have to re-run fglrxconfig...which has gotten rather annoying, but I've learned not to do TOO much multi-tasking...(reminds me of 98) and everything works ok...haven't tried 2k3 yet...but I think it will not be as high as in windows (gfx maxed out, and still get ~70fps)...which I am not too happy about...

goldeneyexs: GPL error, what do you mean? Sounds like your system has some serious issues if it locks like that and you have to reboot that hard. What hardware and kernel are you using? And which games are you referring to when you say you get ~70 FPS?

I got around 3800-3900 from glxgears and around 750 fps from fgl_glxgears
Card is ATI AIW 9700 Pro kernel 2.4.24

Are those number decent for my card ???

Thanks JOPS that README in really usefull, I have to test if the tv-out would work without the drm-kernel.

Today I haven't had time to fight with the drivers because I went out to buy new tv I'll have to update my xfree because I'm currenty using 4.2.1 and your drivers seem to be for 4.3.0. I'll report back if I get the drivers working.

by a GPL error I mean that when the module was trying to install itself into the kernel it complained about the module not having a compatable GPL liscense...however,

I am currently using SuSE 9 stock kernel, 2.4.23? (not at home so can't check)

Gigabyte KT400 mombo (8x AGP)
9800np 128mb
Athlon 2100+
and 3.2.8 drivers...

Games that have frozen on me, are Cannon Smash, winex (cvs), when running w/o desktop..

Recently however I have not had any problems with it locking up...(odd..)

what I mean ~70fps is that in windows with GFX maxed out in ut2k3 (except resolution) I get around 70 atleast

goldeneyexs: Yes, Linux complains about the license of the fglrx driver because it taints the kernel but that's just a warning, not an error message. The module should load just fine anyway. If it doesn't it's probably something else that's wrong.

Use lsmod to check if it's loaded or not:

lsmod | grep fglrx