well, you had a good thing and you broke it. my suggestion above to upgrade the mesa libs was specifically to address a system-hanging problem both the poster and myself had had with mesa 6.1 -- which comes bundled with xorg 6.8. i do not know which version is bundled with xorg 6.7, but you must have created an incompatibility with your upgarde somewhere that prevents dri from starting. check your /var/log/Xorg.0.log for clues as to why dri didn't start. you can also get more debug information from mesa by exporting this variable:

in an xterm window and running your 3d application, e.g. glxgears, in that terminal. i wouldn't hestitate to go back to the older version of mesa (rip out the new one you installed) if you're getting good performance with it.

Oh, I must have not used a right wording. I merely upgraded to 6.2.1 to see if I can notice a performance improvment and it wasn't meant to fixed a broken system.

I know getting old Radeon cards to work is always a pain in the rear so I didn't run `make install' and, as it's documented, only ran the testing to see whether I get any benefit from this software rendering upgrade which wasn't the case. The system lib path was only set for tty and simply removed to revert back to the old settings.

Now adding to my cluelessness, my post was meant to ask you about getting 3D accelarated to work with Radeon 7500 which I did long ago but unfortunately cannot remember the procedure. I do not recall whether I obtained the driver from dri.sourceforg.com or used the one with XFree86 4.3 at the time of configuration. Again my system specifications are:

Hardware: P4 1.6 GHz, SiS mobo, ATI Radeon 7500
For now: XFree86 4.3, Slackware 9.1, kernel 2.4.26 with dri/dmr/mtrr/agpgarp enabled
What I am ultimately upgrading to in the near future: Xorg 6.7, Slackware 10.0, kernel 2.4.26 (don't know which drivers are automatically enabled by default yet)

Thank you

well, you're getting terrific 3d performance out of that old card with your current setup. i have moved off of slackware in favor of gentoo. i am running xorg 6.8 on a gentoo-flavored kernel 2.6.10 with the buggy mesa 6.1 and my opengl is really poor and prone to errors with this old radeon 7000. i am using the stock xorg radeon_dri, the stock kernel driver for radeon and the stock drm.

really it's time to move on to nvidia.....and leave all these tiresome ati problems behind. good luck with your upgrade.

Unfotunately I cannot use Nvidia card because for some strange reason my mobo has a faulty AGP slot and All three Nvidia models I tried do not mount on appropriately which causes the system not to boot properly. But on the other hand my other two ATI cards work perfectly. Beside I rather use Nvidia card on my multimedia oriented Windows machines. From a little that I remember, I didn't have much problem getting 3D accel and openGL to work once I configured Slackware 9.1 so I take it I use the stock drivers as you said.

This helped me out, thanks a million.

I'm fairly new to linux and extremely new to working with kernel options. I was wondering if someone could teach me how to edit the kernel options for my graphics card. I'm sure it would help a lot. Thanks.

hello, I am having the same problem, but I just installed SUSE 10.0 on my computer, and I am wondering if anything canged, because the last post in this section was made in march 2005 and it's april 2006. thanx

PS. You shopuld probably also welcome me to the club of people who tried to wrestle with a radeon card for over a mounth and just now turned to Google for help. Well, I leanrned my lesson buying old ATI cards. And to think, my mom whose biggest computer acievenent is using MSOffice told me told me not do do it, but I didn't listen...