Hey, I'm just starting into the world of linux and I'm loving it. In fact, I've hooked several friends on it too.

It took me a while but I recently got my SUSE Linux 9.1 Pro install all figured out with my sound, 3d acceleration and everything working. I was pretty content with my achievement.

However, 3 days ago I took out the Radeon 9800 Pro and put in a 9700 Pro. Of course I had to reinstall the ATi fgl drivers and whatnot and got it all working. After restarting the x server, I typed fglrxinfo as per ATi's request and got ATi Technologies device so it seemed like it worked. However, under SUSE's control center video settings it still says 3D Acceleration is not enabled. It seems like 3D acceleration is enabled though as I tried an OpenGL game and it seemed to work fine and it didn't give me the No Hardware Acceleration Detected message.

I'm just wondering if I should care about what the control center says and if 3d acceleration is actually working.

Thanks.

i don't use suse, but i think your tests are more reliable than what some gui front-end says...

i wouldn't worry too much about this, as long as you've verified the 3d accel is working fine...

did it appear as "enabled" with the 9800??

It did. I'm thinking that perhaps I should have uninstalled the drivers before adding in the new card... But they were of the same maker and use the same drivers though.

EDIT: Also, is there any way for linux to properly detect/use newly installed optical drives without recompliling the kernel? I've been reading around and people are all saying you have to recomplile the kernel after installing a CD-RW or something similar.

no, you shouldn't need to recompile the kernel to install an optical drive (unless of course for some reason you're using a kernel that can't handle scsi emulation)... in fact, the average linux user will NEVER have to recompile the kernel for anything...

to get cd-rw drives to work with linux 2.4, you just need to enable "scsi emulation", something usually done from your bootloader... usually it's just a matter of adding a line like this to it (lilo example):

append="hdx=ide-scsi"

where "hdx" should be replaced with your actual optical drive's location...

and if it's a cd-rom drive it'll be fine right away, without having to go through any of that...