Radeon 9600XT (and similar) Direct Rendering in FC3 with kernel 2.6.10
 

Hopefully somebody will find this useful. ATI Have just released their new Radeon Drivers for Linux and I was having a hell of a job getting them to work, 2 things were causing problems.

1) The kernel module wasnt being loaded but Xorg was starting regardless only with Direct Rendering Turned off

2) The driver name in the Keyboard InputDevice section was "Keyboard" whereas it should have been "kbd" to mean anything to Xorg (This was preventing Xorg from starting unlike Issue 1) - Using Xorg.conf file generated by fglconfig obviously.

So there were 2 cures to get this working, obviously after renaming XF86Config-4 which was generated by fglconfig the easiest to cure is number 2, open up the file (as root) and edit the line

Driver "Keyboard"

to

Driver "kbd"

Problem 1) Is a problem in the source code to agp_gart usually located in

/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/

in the file agpgart_be.c.

I think the problem is specific to the kernel version because according to my dmesg output from trying to load the driver the Kernel Module was trying to use a function or something called pci_find_class which wasnt available, the fix was to change alll of these to another function, I wont bother going into detail on what but you can download the modified file here:

n.ethz.ch/student/fbianco/download/linux/agpgart_be.c

Replace the file with that and rebuild with make_install.sh itll do a test load on the driver and all should be fine, now give your system a quick reboot and you should have direct rendering support in your FC3 distro :D

HTH someone.