Hi, for months I have been trying to get DRI enabled on my Dell Inspiron 3800 and today I finally succeeded. I thought I would post the method I used to help others in the future.

First off I'm using Ubuntu but the solution should work for other DEB based distros. as well.

I basically followed this guide: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75393 except with several key changes. The author of the guide states that you should use the 386 kernel files for older chipsets, however I kept running into the error: config_x86_CMPXCHG needs to be enabled in the kernel when attempting to compile the drivers using a 386 kernel. But when I installed a 686 kernel (without hyperthreading) it worked!

Also make sure to use the June or July 2005 versions of the DRI drivers from http://dri.freedesktop.org/snapshots/archive/ and not the most current. Not sure why but the new versions won't work.

I hope that this helps somebody as it took me far to long to figure this solution out.

Thanks.

Kudos. Would you include kernel version and xorg version to get MachDri working. Thanx for contributing.

Sure, the Kernel version was 2.6.12-10-686 and Xorg was 6.8.2.

Thanks for the information. I will give it another try. I used
the latest versions of the drivers and they didn't work.