OK

I want to use the power of my ATi card, under windows 3D stuff works fine, but under Linux I only have minimal settings, (3D stuff is slow)

I tried downloading the Linux driver from the ATi website, however after installing the rpm my system would not load KDE,

I use SuSE 9.1 personal

Dose anyone else here use the ATi Radeon 9600SE,
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The last time I looked, ATI's drivers were way behind. They only support XF86 4.3 instead of 4.4 What version of XF86 are you running? Also, report the errors in /var/log/kdm.log or /var/log/xfree86.log or whatever your distro uses to report X errors.

OK??

I am very new to Linux and I'm not sure what "XF86" I am running, I am running SuSE 9.1 Personal, What ever this distro has,

There are 3 rpm install files on the ATi website, I have tried installing each one in YaST with the same result, The system will not load KDE!! I dont know why?

As I don’t know many Linux commands, I just did a new install to fix my KDE problem, The command line prompt thingy is a bit overwhelming for me, I don’t know what to type!
(I was a Microshaft Windows Drone for quite some time, I am very used to looking for menus and desktop GUI's to do things in!)

I am learning though, One day I might understand all of Linux! But for now I still need help thanks!!

To find out what version of XF86 you have, execute
"XFree86 -version"

if you get the message "command not found" then execute "cd /usr/X11R6/bin" before you do the previous command.


Only if your version of XF86 is supported by the ATI driver, then will you be able to use it. You probably think that this is strange since Windows has a unified driver model and most of its drivers will work accross multiple versions of Windows, but XFree86 and the Linux kernel are "dynamically changing [beasts]" and drivers won't work between versions without changes.

If your version of XF86 isn't compatible, then you could either upgrade or downgrade to a version that's supported. Other than that, you're out of luck at least for now. The defacto DRM/DRI drivers don't support ATI cards above 9500 since ATI hasn't released the specs yet (A petetion is underway though). There is also a project for making drivers for the rv350 series http://volodya-project.sourceforge.net/R300.php but you shouldn't use it.

Suse has instructions on how to install these drivers.

Good luck - ATI drivers can be "challenging" to work with, and you may end up hitting a few dead ends before you succeed. -- J.W.