LinuxQuestions.org - Slackware 9.0 & Radeon 9700 Pro

I thought you guys who helped out might be interested in how this all went.

Well I burned out and needed a rest. In the days following my last post in this thread I reinstalled Slack 9.0 twice, successfully compiled two kernels and spent hours at the command line trying out different X configurations. Unfortunately I still can't get the ATI drivers working.

The first time I compiled my kernel I was quite over the moon. I rebooted and attempted to install the ATI drivers again. I couldn't build the fglrx module again (yep, agpgart was loaded). After messing about for a while, I decided to boot up with the old kernel and try again. This time the module built and installed without a hitch. Unfortunately I still couldn't startx (after making sure all the modules were running and using fglrxconfig). I got the error previously described (fglrx does not exist).

After messing around some more I did another fresh installation (using the bare kernel). Without doing anything else (other than installing the kernel source pkg and loading agpgart) I tried to install the drivers again. I couldn't build the fglrx module.

Here are some notes:

I have successfully built and installed the ATI drivers using the bare kernel from the Slackware 9.0 CD. However, I have not been able to startx because although the fglrx module has been built, installed and loaded, x complains that it's not actually there.

I have built a pretty standard i686 kernel (without agpgart built in) and installed it successfully. Unfortunately I can't build the fglrx module with it. This is most likely because I don't understand enough to make sure I've done everything correctly in view of the difficulties I'm having.

I've been thinking. I've noticed a lot of other people here have installed the ATI drivers successfully. The one thing that stands out as being different with my hardware config is that I have a motherboard with an unsupported agp chipset on it (SiS 655). In order to get the agpgart module loaded I have to do "modprobe agpgart agp_try_unsupported=1" or load it from within rc.modules.

I can only assume the problems I'm having are related to this. I'm more determined than I might usually be (to find a solution to this) because I really like Slackware. Since I've been messing with it I've gotten a sense of it's stability and robustness which gives me the confidence to try stuff out that would have given me the horrors on other distros. I've learned heaps in this last week, ands now I've had a break (for the sake of my sanity :) ) I'll dive into it again and keep you guys informed.

Thanks for listening to my long rants to :)