It's true that using mesa with the vesa or fb driver will enable GLX but it won't enable hardware accelleration. If you try to run anything in GL mode it'll be painfully slow.

This GATOS driver is different from the other so the common dri thing won't be necesary. I'm not familiar with it so I don't know about building and installing it. The page did make reference to part of it being included with x.org. The drm-kernel section says the module is not required because the cvs version of x.org 7 and the linux kernel will setup the card properly.

It can't hurt to try using the latest xfree version. The worst that can happen will be the driver prevents X to start. Any time that happens (for any reason) you can always edit the xorg.conf and set it to load the generic vga or svga driver until you fix it.

so I guess the real question here is:
what version of XFree do I have? 4.3.0?

The whole GATOS thing looks a bit out of date!

Thanks,
Riddick

As you mentioned before you have Xorg. It's the successor to XFree86.

I've done some serious googling now that I know your card and have found a couple of things

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ATI_Rage_Mobility_M3

Maybe you can get a newer rage driver for xorg?

And from http://tuxmobil.org/graphic_linux.html

The Xi Graphics project is commercial so it's not free. The link to a patch is dead.

Also, in your xorg.conf file make sure you have certain things: snippets from http://www.rserve.biz/gentoo/kilrathi/xorg.conf

The important ones here are GLcore, dri and glx. Freetype is for fonts I think. And try without dbe (Double Buffering Extension). pex5, record, xie and v4l I've never used. Probably for video capture.

Leave out that Modeline entry from the mointor section, and for each "Display" subsection you can add more resolutions. I use
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

Note: You might need to put the ati rage kernel module back in.

You've been amazing thanks for all this:
so apparently the r128 driver should be OK - no?
Shall I uninstall all the "common" and "rage" DRI packages,
and reinstall XOrg?

I've been loading all of those in xorg.conf

When you say newer rage driver - do you mean from the DRI website?
Is that related to the Kernel module?
Where will I find that!

Do I need the XiG graphics things to have acceleration? It doesn't look like the thing I need.

This seems interesting, but can I still run my KDE on it?
http://www.xig.com/Pages/Summit/Series/LX-Platinum.html

Let me know what is the best way to proceed!

Thanks, you've been amazing so far!
Riddick

Thanks! Your patience has been equally helpful. The common and dri things will not be necessary. What do you mean by "loading those in xorg.conf"? There should be no reason to reinstll xorg. If you need to restore the mesa files you just get a mesa package for that. I'm not sure if a single driver like r128 can be upgraded by itself. The wiki link I pasted had r128 underlined as a hyperlink. See where that goes. The xig thing looks like accelleration for a professional environment, hence the commercial license. It's not what you're looking for.

Once we finally figure this out it won't matter which window manager you use: KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, XFCE, etc. They all run on top of X, which is where hardware is setup. So if 3D works in KDE it'll also work in, say, FVMW.

Try the r128 driver again using the xorg.conf snippets as a guide and see what you get. If it's still not right post the "modules" and "graphics device" sections of your xorg.conf. As I mentioned way back at the beginning of this, ATI is a pain to get 3D working due to poor vendor support and proprietary drivers.

I should probably mention that with the radeon mobility card in my laptop, with 16MB RAM and dri enabled, performance is not suitable for large 3D apps. Doom Legacy in a window is fine, but X crashes trying to run a 3D app full screen.

By loading I mean most of those modules were already in my xorg.conf

I had doubts about KDE because of XiG, but if we're
not using it then it's no issue!

The main usage for this 3D acceleration will be for 3ddesk... we'll see what performance we get!

so: should I get MESA back? I guess I should...

Will try the new org.conf setup, and let you know!
Thanks again,

Riddick

That xorg.conf doesn't make a difference!
shall I get MESA again?

3ddeskd says: glXIsDirect failed, no Direct Rendering possible!

Tell me how to proceed!

Remember that glxinfo is still broken because of the files we deleted!

Riddick

I looked at the 3ddesk thing the other day. It's gonna need hardware accelleration to run at a smooth speed. To be honest I wouldn't trust it to not crash with my ATI chip.

At this point I would reinstall the mesa stuff to get the libGLU file back. That's the file that provides the information for glxinfo to report: no GLU, no glxinfo info. Next time you try to remove the mesa files, just move or rename them instead of delete them - put them in your ~ or put a _ in front of the name.

I think the way I would do it is to download new packages. According to your username info you're using both Suse and Slackware. The Slackware package browser, http://slackware.it/en/pb/searchfile...ring=mesa&w=on ,
has the x11 packages. It may even be a newer version than what you have now. Check /var/log/packages to see your current version - something like x11-6.8.1-i486-1.tgz. Get all the x11 packages and run (as root)

upgradepkg --install-new x11*.tgz

If they're the same version use installpkg. This will restore the mesa things. If there's a newer version of the r128 driver it would be there too.

BTW: could you post your "modules" and "graphics device" sections of xorg.conf

Right - I am working this week but then I'm going back to Rome and
I will give you my full attention, although I will keep checking back
and seeing what I can do.

Let's take it for said that I am on the Slackware current setup.

Hard deleting was a bit silly.. yes; can I use the
"slackupdate.sh" script to update X?

My current xorg.conf file is here:

http://www.bits.bris.ac.uk/wellconnected/xorg.conf

Thanks for everything!
I will try to get to a net cafe and download the relevant X files.

Thanks again,
Riddick

Double post!
I guess I could use this to thank you again for bearing with me.
If 3ddesk doesn't work it's not a big issue, but it is a good way of testing if it's worked!

Excellent!

Riddick

I learned the hard way about deleting files myself. I still make the mistake from time to time and it's always a pain to restore the files. (I recently accidentally deleted my entire kde directory!)

I'm not familar with that update script. The xorg.conf file looks ok. A couple of points, though:

Load "pex5"
Load "record"
Load "xie"

I haven't seen these until I found the example for you. It should be safe to comment them out and see what happens.

#Specific modelines for this model
Modeline "1400x1050" 113.89 1400 1432 1552 1752 1050 1053 1056 1084 -hsync -vsync

Another option I'm not familiar with. Maybe comment that too.

And for the grahics device section, keep those other card identifying options handy. You might not need them but if you do...

Thank you for bearing with me too. This has been a real chin-scratcher. A typical ATI 3D problem. It was a year before I figured mine out. I tried every guide I found with no success and finally got lucky one day with a Google search. I guess what works for one person won't necesarily work for another.

I reinstalled the X11 packages from my Slackware current CDs amd it worked!!!
3ddeskd running at only texturesize 256 (instead of 1024)
but it's fullscreen and it's goooooood.

Thanks for bearing with me.

I wil send out my xorg.conf out to the people who asked for it,
the others with C600s!

I can't believe we succeeded!

Thanks so much!

Riddick