Okay, bioe007. Thanks for your help! I switched vesa to i810, and this problem is officially fixed. Everything's better. mplayer wasn't doing fullscreen, and now it can do fullscreen. My default depth was 24, but I switched it to 16 to make sure DRI would be functional. Is there anything I should look for as evidence that DRI is working? Also, I don't really notice a difference between depth 16 and 24. Any differences you've noticed in your experience? I looked at xorg.conf's man page again, and it explained that depth is "color depth, but I really just don't see a difference between 16 and 24. Thanks again.

I looked at the Enabling 3D Acceleration in X11 thread, and tried setting my xorg.conf up the way he suggested, but when I did that it said monitor 2 cannot be used on the same pipe line (?) and that screen 1 had an unusable configuration. Made some changes to xorg.conf so that X runs, but DRI isn't working. I found out how to check if dri is running -- glxinfo. Below is my end result. I think I might tackle DRI again after I try compiling.

[drm] failed to load kernel module "i915"
(II) I810(0): [drm] drmOpen failed
(EE) I810(0): [dri] DRIScreenInit failed. Disabling DRI.

About the color depth, 16 usually looks just as good as 24. But, if you do any sort of graphics editing (even with xpaint) you'll need to use color depth of at least 24bpp or you may lose image quality.

Thanks for the info on depth. I might go ahead and put it on 24, then, as we like the gimp.

<edit> ack.. ! didn't see this was continued to page 2 <edit>

try running:
to see if DRI is working. if not make sure the:
is in your xorg.conf

if all that checks out, then compile your own kernel. try making everything AGP and DRM modular, also framebuffer stuff should be modular, and make sure your lilo.conf has 'vga=normal' for the kernel you're making.

<edit #2 - I really need to read before replying >

so it looks like your system is trying to load the i915 kernel module, which doesn't seem available. I think tis time you tried compiling a kernel. (If you really want DRI enabled)

I am by no means a guru at this linux thing yet, but I _really_ like the guide in my sig. very straightforward.

I'm going through that guide in your sig now. I see that I should upgrade module-init-tools to make it compatible with 2.6.*, so I'll start with that and work my way up. I don't game on my computers (xbox mostly), but I want the hardware to do what it's capable of doing. Turns out I can mount psp and my cruzer micro thumbdrive already, but dvd burning is atrocious, so compiling may ease that pain. I'm also eager to see how the gimp performs with DRI functional. Thanks, bioe007.

For anyone who got to this page by searching for mounting psps or the cruzer micro, here's my fstab entries relating to those those two devices:

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/psp vfat noauto,noatime,users,shortname=win95,check=s 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usb vfat users 0 0

I think these modules seen with lsmod make mounting those devices possible:

uhci 23804 0 (unused)
usb-storage 63520 0
ehci-hcd 17644 0 (unused)
usbcore 56812 1 [usb-storage uhci ehci-hcd]

I just had to break off for a moment and explain that, because I never liked when someone says they can successfully do something here in the forums but don't elaborate on how.

why? what is the output of:

depmod -v

???

i'm running slack 11 and mine is 3.2.2

you shouldn't need to upgrade anything to build a 2.6 kernel on your slack box. unless you did some serious tweaking during install.