I FIGURED IT OUT!!! Finally, full 3d accel for my slackware box!
I'm running an ATI radeon 8500 and for days now I've been surfing around trying solution after solution that other people have had success with trying to get my ATI card to run OpenGL games. Well, none of them worked but they lead my into the right direction.

Ok ok, enough rambling out of me, I'm going to get straight to the goods.
I have a feeling this will work for all ATI cards, not too sure about the 9800 yet.

First a little system information.
Distro: Slackware 9.0, upgraded to 9.1 using swaret
Athlon-XP +2500 barton
512ddr
30Gig hd
Onboard AC97 sound card - buggy (for now )
Dropline Gnome, as my wm.

Anyway, here is what I did to get every going.
After using swaret to upgrade to slack 9.1 I recomplied the new kernel 2.4.22, to ensure that everything I needed was in order. (sound especially)

Then I went and downloaded the ATI XF86 4.3 drivers from schneider-digital website. I think you can use the new "offical" ones off of the actual ATI website, but for the sake of keeping everything the same to ensure your success just use the same drivers.
Once those drivers are downloaded, extract it to the same directory you saved it in. Open the newly extracted files and find the fglrx-glc22-4.3.0-2.9.13.i586.rpm file. cd to the directory that contains this file and type this will make the file useable in slackware by converting the .rpm file to a .tgz. Once that is done, open a new terminal (if you closed the other one after the conversion) make sure you cd to the same directory that your new .tgz file is in and type in the terminal, follow the instructions on the screen. After this all the files will be in place for you to now make the module for the driver.

cd to /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod and type ./make.sh - this makes the module
then
cd to /lib/modules/fglrx and type ./make_install.sh - this installs and modprobes it, but it wouldn't hurt to do a lsmod afterward to make sure that both agpgart and fglrx are running.
Once thats done, run fglrxconfig by typing fglrxconfig in a terminal. Follow the instructions to the best of your knowledge. One of the extra benifits i found by running the fglrxconfig, it enabled my mouse wheel making it useable .
Once the fglrxconfig is finished it would of written a new XF86 config called XF86Config-4, which is located in /etc/X11/ directory.

Open it with your favourite editor and scroll down until you see the "Graphics Device Section". In this section scroll down until you see the driver section, it should say something like this:
Driver "vga"
change it to:
Driver "fglrx"
This makes the X-server use the fglrx drivers enabling 3d accel.
Save your changes to the file and restart the X-server by doing a simple ctrl+alt+backspace. Re-login as root and type fglrxinfo in a terminal, this should say a bunch of ati driver info similar to this:

display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Radeon 8500 DDR Athlon (3DNow!)
OpenGL version string: 1.3 (X4.3.0-2.9.13)

I hope this theard helps. I will be checking back once in a while to answer some questions if there are any.

P.S. I would of really liked to post some links but this is my first post and I needed to have posted 5 times prior to this one to be allowed to.

Way to go

I was thinking of getting a 9800 pro ati card to replace my current nvidia, but way too difficult. Maybe sometime in the future.

Tobad i get an error trying to do this ...

what kind of error?

Never mind i could install it now but now i just get cannot find screen =/ i did change from vga to fglrx

and when i do modprobe fglrx it just failes.... IRQ and that kinda error msg

ismod too
Now I cant even go into X ..

Now I feel like crying

what's the point in having grafix accel? for Linux? are there any games that use those grafix??

Enemy Territory is my favorite along with TuxRacer, of course...

Enemy Territory so far seems to be the best free "beer" (but still closed) game available for Linux

-Shade

Bengo

I want it for 3D Softwares , Games
and other stuff

Good Question. some of the Default Screensavers need 3D acceleration to work properly........and If one wants to install "Real Slick Screensavers" 3D accel needs to be working to enjoy them.........

quake 2, quake3,q3ta, rtcw, ut2003 to mention a few. Plus I get better gameplay and better fps in linux than in winxp.

****
cd to /lib/modules/fglrx and type ./make_install.sh - this installs and modprobes it, but it wouldn't hurt to do a lsmod afterward to make sure that both agpgart and fglrx are running.
****

I did that and neither of those were in lsmod...
What to do?

I've got a Radeon 9800

fglrxconfig is not found as a command

dar?

everything else seemed to be working fine though

Try...

/usr/X11R6/bin/fglrxconfig

or do fglrxconfig as root...not su.

EDIT: Let me clarify...for some reason, when you su to root, fglrxconfig doesn't work unless you include the path. But logged in as root, it works fine. I haven't had the time to make the proper changes (as in paths, etc), so for now this is all I can offer.


HTH

try su'ing to root like this
the - gives you root's path as well