The bad news is that the ATI drivers are pure evil.
However, I got a Mobility Radeon 9600 working passably well under Slackware-current/kernel 2.6.6 (with Xorg - but theren't no reason this shouldn't work with XFree - just leave out the xorg specific bits) by the following method:
(And yes, I know this is cut'n'pasted directly from another post I made earlier.)
EDITED TO INCLUDE:
I have an AMD-64. If you don't, don't select any of the AMD64 stuff - select the option appropriate to your system instead (e.g. via-agp or whatever).
This solution owes a hell of a lot to this one:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...threadid=143960
In your kernel, /dev/agpgart and AMD64 on-chip support must be enabled, and the Direct Rendering Manager disabled.
Get the latest (4.3.0 at time of writing) ATI Radeon driver from
http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/...mp;submit=GO%21
You'll also need to download DRI. Now, the latest version snapshot (as of 09-Jun-2004) doesn't work. One that does work (from 08/02/04) is available at:
http://www.freedesktop.org/~dri/sna...ux.i386.tar.bz2
Let me know if you encounter a more recent one that does the job.
This is all best done at the command line - not in a shell console.
run rpm2tgz on the ati driver rpm, and use pkgtool to install it.
cd lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod
sh make.sh
cd ..
sh make_install.sh
modprobe fglrx
lsmod to make sure that amd64_agp, fglrx, and agpgart are all loaded
fglrxconfig
You'll have to enable external agp here. When you're asked if you want to save, say no to all the suggested file names and locations, and instead provide it with the following address:
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
BEFORE YOU DO THIS IT IS A VERY GOOD IDEA TO MAKE A COPY OF YOUR OLD xorg.conf FILE. Call it xorg.conf-old or somesuch. If everything goes horribly wrong, you can copy it back to its original name to get X to at least load again.
Go to wherever you've unpacked dri and
sh install.sh
Add this to modprobe.conf:
install fglrx /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install fglrx && { /sbin/modprobe amd64_agp; /bin/true; }
You should be able to startx with everything working now, but I like to reboot, just in case (years of Micro$oft related paranoid behaviour are hard to shake).
In X, open up a shell terminal.
There are a couple of useful utilities that you can use to test your card.
/usr/X11R6/bin/glxgears
Measures the speed in 3d - enlarge to full screen and leave running for 30 seconds or so before closing. At fullscreen 1050 x 780 it reports:
1318 frames in 5.0 seconds = 263.600 FPS
/usr/X11R6/bin/glxinfo
Provides info on your card. The line you really want to see is:
"direct rendering: Yes"
/usr/X11R6/bin/fgl_glxgears
ATI's version of the speed test. Currently produces the error: "Error: couldn't get fbconfig"
/usr/X11R6/bin/fglrxinfo
Should now produce the following result:
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: MOBILITY RADEON 9600 Generic
OpenGL version string: 1.3 (X4.3.0-3.9.0)
If you want, you can use pkgtool to remove the mesa driver. If you do it after the ATI driver install is complete, you'll probably have to reboot to get glxgears working again.
Now to try a 3d game. We're going to need a test subject.
Make sure you have the SDL libraries, then go to
http://www.wareweb.net/slackware/ and download the tuxracer package (tuxracer is bitchy about compiling from source under Slack, but this package offers a solution to that).
Be nice if we could do something about that fbconfig error though... and I'm SURE this thing could be faster.