First of all, hello.

Now, my problem began when I finished installing the latest up2date software off RHN, I installed the drivers for the card (fglrx-glc22-4.2.0-2.5.1) ran the script to configure the drivers (fglrxconfig) and then restarting in graphical mode. Until this step there were no problems. How ever I wanted to test my newly installed Radeon on Linux, so I popped in the UT2003 CD3 and installed the game. I noticed it ran too ssllooww, choppy and sloppy actually, so I went off to the Internet and investigate what could be causing the problem, I then noticed in the supplied documentation (within UT2k3's) that it uses madly the AGP bus, so obviously I went to investigate if whether my system had activated the agpgart driver and it reported it had. Before continuing on what happened next, let me tell you what my system configuration is:

MoBo K7S5A Pro (not too good, I know)
512 Mb DDR 333 RAM
Athlon XP 1800+ CPU
Spphire Radeon 9500 128 Mb DDR VRAM (non pro version)
SBLive! Value
Western Digital 40 Gb ATA 100 HD
Seagate 8 Gb ATA 33 HD (where Linux resides)
LG 16x-10x-40x CD-RW drive
Lite-On 16x DVD-Rom drive

With this in mind, I shall continue with my sad story

So I went off to find out how to enable AGP, because lsmod showed the module loaded but not being utilized by anything: agpgart 40096 0 (unused). I was in the middle of this, when I had to go out, so I shut down the computer. Until this part I did nothing to the system configuration (that I could remember at that time), so I asumed it was safe to shut down the computer. I got home a few hours later and fired on the computer, the system was initializing normally, but when it came to the graphical login, suddenly and unexpectedly it rebooted! I waited to the initialization process to finish the file system check, and then again *paff*! reboot. I popped in the RHL 7.3 CD1 into my primary drive and entered to the rescue console to change the inittab file so the initialization was made to mode 3, console (if there is any other way to do this I am not aware of it), logged in as root, and checked the configuration for the Radeon, I DID not make any other changes to the system when I shut it down this afternoon, so it had to be some config problem. I checked again the fglrxconfig and tried to start X manuallly... *paff*! reboot. I went again into root and checked the /var/log/XFree86.0.log file, this is what I found...

(II) fglrx(0): doing DRIScreenInit
drmOpenDevice: minor is 0
drmOpenDevice: node name is /dev/dri/card0
drmOpenDevice: open result is -1, (No such device)
drmOpenDevice: Open failed

from the look of it seems as a drm problem (duh!), and earlier in the file I got a warning:

(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:1:0:1) found
(--) Chipset Radeon R300 AD (R9500) found

I tried to remain clam, and uninstalled the driver (rpm -e fglrx-xxx), made sure to erase any trace of the driver (/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.o, /lib/modules/fglrx/*.*, etc, etc) and tried to reinstall the driver, reconfigure it and startx. It seemed as if every thing was OK. Then I closed the X session, changed the init mode to 5 and rebooted. As the system was booting up, and got to the part where it should go into the gdm screen... *paff*! reboot, with the exact same warning/error in the XFree86.0.log. I remade my steps, and reconfigured the driver (without reinstalling it) then I noticed something wierd... the installation script complaint about something that had to do with my current kernel version and that it my not find a "tailored" version of the driver for my kernel (2.4.18-27.7.x), so it built it on the fly, and that I made sure to check the readme.txt file (which is actually called fglrx_info.txt under /lib/modules/fglrx), then I noticed that this *particular* kernel version is not supported by the driver, the closest match is the 2.4.18-*17*.7.x. So my questions here are:

Is anyone else with this chip (R300) and this particular kernel version having the same problem?

would it be safe to go back to the 2.4.18-17.7.x kernel (which was installed via RPM)? or is anyone having problems with it under the 2.4.20 kernel version?

I'd install the 2.4.20 kernel, but since I use GRUB as the boot loader and in my experience the make install script of source kernels do not generate correctly the kernel image (complaints about not having LILO, main reason I install via RPM) nor install it with GRUB, I do not know what to do... Any suggestions are very very well come!

As of this writing I switched back to the VESA driver so I could use the graphical interface and write this problem report to you.