ATI Mobility M4 on RH 8.0

wvillers · 02-04-2003, 11:45 AM

Hi all,
After a few years away from Linux, I have recently installed RedHat 8.0 on my Dell Latitude C800 (PIII 850MHz, 512MB RAM, ATI Mobility M4 32MB VRAM).

I was quite impressed by how easy and painless it was, especially the fact that all my devices were recognized!! Also impressive is the time to install and the footprint of the OS+ apps: 30 minutes, 2GB!!!

My Mobility M4 has been recognized as a Rage 128 Mobility, using the r128 driver. That would be fine (I can display Gnome/Bluecurve at 1400x1050), if the "Enable Hardware 3D Acceleration" wasn't greyed out...

I am wondering why this would be the case as this card can do OGL acceleration and perform pretty well with OGL-based apps (CAD, CAE...).

Does anybody have tricks/suggestions to enable hardware acceleration?

Thanks in advance

Wolven · 02-04-2003, 02:23 PM

Let me see what all I can throw in here.

ATI has begun supporting linux to some small degree...

Their site with the drivers:
http://mirror.ati.com/support/driver.html

Direct link for your card, I think:

http://mirror.ati.com/support/produc...e&cmdNext=Next

Here is an example config file for basic use:
http://www.univ-tln.fr/~veron/LINUX/...tabledell.html

To enable tv out, go to

http://freshmeat.net/projects/atitvout

If you want to enable AGP 4x (faster frame rates, etc.), then
put this line in your "Device":

Option "AGPMode" "4"

Hope all that helps some!

wvillers · 02-06-2003, 03:07 AM

Thx. I tried what you said, it actually lets me do this, I'm assuming it did some good (at least I'd like to think so)... What is strange though is that RH recognized my card a Rage Mobility 128 even though it's a Mobility M4 (I bet it's pretty much the same). What puzzles me is the use of the r128 driver which does not offer OGL acceleration, whereas the ati driver does (but kills my screen, so I guess it's not so good ;-) )...
Anyway, thanks for the reply.

Wolven · 02-06-2003, 09:18 AM

Because that's what the card is based on, probably. Some little checksum in there probably just set it off, or whatever. Same stuff happens to a lot of drivers, which is where you come in, and say, "no no no, little computer. It's one of THESE!"
:_) Let me know if I can do anything else for you.