Ok, First and foremost I'd like to apologize. I am new to linux, and I have googled my heart out for the past two days, and I have found many answers to my question, however I still can't get any of them to work. If anyone can offer something simpler or different than what is already out there it would be much appreciated. Now, my problem:

I am running an ATI 9700 on an ASUS P4S800-DE with P4 3.0 w/HT.
(EDIT) Running Mandrake 10.0 with Kernel 2.6

After much googling and my first linux learning experience, I was able to install the ATI drivers. (using sh make.sh, etc... the problem I had was the kernel source was not available so it could not construct the mod.. I got taht worked out and ran fglrxconfig no problem) This forum was very helpful in doing so. However, now that I have them installed they will not load. I know for a fact they have been installed correctly, but it continues to go back to Mesa SoftwareGL when i do fglrxinfo:

I read elsewhere that this can be caused by improper selection of resolution. So I ran fglrxconfig several times, trying various resolutions and settings, but to no avail. No matter what i do it is still going to Mesa. I also read somewhere that I can do "insmod" to get it to load the ATI module manually, but I am new to linux so I don't know how to do this, or what exactly it does. I also read that doing this won't load it automatically.



I also read somewhere that deleting the Mesa library altogether would do teh trick, but I don't trust my linux skills enough to do so. I checked the ATI support page, and they suggested I do rpm -e on the mesa library. But since i had already rpm -Uh --force the ATI drivers, this package didn't exist. It doesn't seem logical to me that it is using a package that doesn't exist.


Any insight would be helpful, even something I could google myself would be appreciated.

Thanks.

AGH. Once again this post doesn't help me.... like i said I am new to this, and that tutorial is for those running Slackware. I went to do it and discovered I can't perform their basic "rpm2tgz" command. Yes i'm a newbie, but I'm trying to learn... and it's rather difficult to do so if everything out there is not well explained. Thanks for the help nonetheless.

Are you using Xorg or Xfree? And try insmod fglrx, that will manually load the Fglrx driver. You should also look at step 11 if you are using Xorg.

--Steve

I am using XFree86. I will try the insmod, but how do I get it to do that automatically? (if it does work)

EDIT: it is XFree version 4.3

Not sure about mandrake but for Gentoo its /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.x

post your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 here. Have you adjusted the settings in that? Also post you /var/log/XFree.0.log file. I use xorg on my computer if you do it will be more like /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.log