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kyuso 12-23-2006 12:34 AM

ATI Xpress 200M in Fedora Core 5 success with 3D accel
 
After struggling for several months since Fedora Core 4 to have my HP zv6000 show 3D acceleration in ATI Radeon Express 200M, I finally succeeded.

My setup:
Fedora Core 5 with latest update (kernel 2.6.18-1.2257)
ATI Xpress 200M with 128MB dedicated
AMD/ATI proprietary driver 6.8.2-8.32.5 for x86-32bit
Steps to make it work:
  1. boot the machine in console mode
  2. cd to where you downloaded ATI driver (the directory where it exists must be writable) and type
    Code:

    sh ati-driver-installer-*-run
  3. To make SELinux happy, type
    Code:

    chcon -t textrel_shlib_t \
      /usr/lib/dri/*.so \
      /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/*.so \
      /usr/lib/xorg/*.so.*

  4. Another thing to make SELinux happy is do
    Code:

    chmod u+x \
    /lib/modules/KERNEL-VERSION/kernel/drivers/char/drm/fglrx.ko \
        /usr/lib/dri/*.so \
        /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/*.so \
        /usr/lib/xorg/*.so.*

  5. I found I still need the following
    Code:

    ldconfig
  6. To initialize X configuration to use ATI driver,
    Code:

    aticonfig --initial
  7. you can customize more using aticonfig (man aticonfig for more info), or even edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf if you know what you are doing

There must be rpm packages that makes this simpler, but I didn't want to wait for packagers to package them; I just want to download the driver from the vendor and install them right away.

Anyway, ever since AMD bought ATI, ATI's drivers seem to be better engineered than before.

I now have 3D acceleration in all my desktops and laptops except for an older laptop with ATI Mobility U1.

locutus42 01-23-2007 12:55 PM

ATI did finally fix a 1 year old problem with the Express 200M chip/card in the 8.32.5( and 8.33.6 ) drivers. Fixing a major problem across the Linux disto board. A year ago, I was only able to get one driver to work at getting 3D acceleration( dri ) and that took extra tweaking of the ATI kernel source code. Hundreds of forum threads discussed this but ATI would only say to us that they do not support notebook chipsets and that we needed to go to the hardward vendor for support.

Later on, some drivers would work with the 200M but we had to enable both the onboard video memory( sideport ) AND shared memory( UMA ) for the driver to work. Even then, the performance was about 30% less than that old driver working with sideport-only memory.

It now looks like they finally got around to fixing this problem and the results are pretty good. Both preformance has been boosted and graphic display issues resolved( no more double cursors at display top edge ).

I do have to the X to turn the composite extension off in xorg.conf though:
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection
NOTE: looking at /var/log/Xorg.0.log shows COMPOSITE extention initialized ok.

I've run XGL and both Compiz and Beryl successfully. Yeah!


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