ATI 9700 Pro + Fedora 1 --- How I Did It

After literally 40+ hours on google, these forums, and all parts here and yon of the web I finally got this to work. ..Thought I would share my success story in hopes that it helps someone else...

Keep in mind as you read this I am relatively new to Linux and may (probably) will make several errors in this recounting. Some of these steps may not have been necessary, but I'm trying to include the ones that seemed to get me closer to a resolution. I think I made every mistake and looked up the solution for each.

1 -- I did a complete "everything" install, since I had the diskspace and got frustrated failing deps and/or and chasing components all around the web. This was probably not necessary but it is absolutely necessary to have the kernel source installed, which you get with an everything install. Now that I have it working and it's fresh in my mind I'll probably wipe it clean and do a re-install with what I feel I need.

2-- Recompile the kernel

I found an excellent guide on this forum for rh 8-9

threadid=91503 (sorry, cant post url's yet)

much thanks to Thetargos. Pay particular attention to the section on including radeon and agpgart as _MODULES_ , and leaving out the others in the section. This would have saved me about 10 hours.

3 -- Reboot into your new kernel (make sure you choose it as it didn't default for me) and head over ATI's site and grab their latest drivers.

these are for XFree86 4.3.0 others are available... theres a note in the read me about redhat and having to force the package otherwise you'll get conflicts so

rpm -i --force fglrx*.rpm

now at this point I got errors - Tailored kernel module for fglrx not present in your system

It seemed to go ahead and give it a shot anyway..just in case and out of desperation i went ahead and followed it's recomendations after the error message and forged ahead.

4 -- Run the fglrxconfig answer the question and reboot, just to make damn sure the x server restarts. After your reboot you may want to look and see what mods you actually have loading succesfully

lsmod

look and see if your fglrx module is loaded, and maybe if your lucky agpgart too..i wasn't

after fiddling around with the external/internal agpgart options I tried this

modprobe agpgart agp_try_unsupported=1 (this worked in my case with a SIS665 chipset)

and it loaded beautifully..I restarted X and haven't looked back. 3800fps glxgears and all is good.

The most important tools I used in tracking down the problems were the XFree86.0.log in /var/log/ and dmesg (for specific module loading problems) and god bless these forums and google.

Things really stared to click after I rebuilt the kernel with radeon and agpgart as _MODULES_ rather than into the kernel and got rid of the things that I didn't need.

Hope that kinda helps someone in a similar situation, I'll be happy to answer and specifics to the best of my ability (remember I'm new : ] ). LIke I said before I think I made every mistake I could have some of them multiple times and an error your getting may ring a bell with me...

Perhaps you could post your XF86Config or XF86Config-4 (which ever one your system uses). I have been trying to get an extended desktop forever as well with no success. The closest I ever came was to have a virtual desktop of 2048x768 cloned on both monitors. Thanks

I don't use the extended desktop feature, however, if you'd still like to see my x-config let me know..

Thanks : ]