I had the same problem. Enter this into your console as root:

ln -s /usr/lib/libpng12.so /usr/lib/libpng10.so.0


That should sort you out.

Thanks, motub.






----Update----

$ glxgears
16754 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3350.800 FPS
19486 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3897.200 FPS
19480 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3896.000 FPS
19482 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3896.400 FP

$ fgl_glxgears
3384 frames in 5.0 seconds = 676.800 FPS
3535 frames in 5.0 seconds = 707.000 FPS
3498 frames in 5.0 seconds = 699.600 FPS
3467 frames in 5.0 seconds = 693.400 FPS

$ uptime
23:47:49 up 7:35, 0 users, load average: 2.01, 2.96, 3.16

So far, so good. However I did have to restart X as my graphics performance in both glxgears and fgl_glxgears became very choppy (probably due to a runaway process more than anything else)

These FPS results are with a Radeon 9700 Pro (128mb), Pentium 4 3.6 and 512mb DDR.

Using Mandrake 10.0 Official and latest (3.9.0) FGLRX from Ati.com.

It certainly seems to favour:
a) A clean install
b) Mandrake 10.0 Official

But only time will tell.

I have Fedora Core 2 installed and managed to get the ATI 3.9 drivers installed successfully. However when I start X in runlevel 5 I lose signal to my monitor.

I have a ATI Radeon 9200 SE card. I don't seem to have any errors in Xorg.0.log when I startup. Any ideas?

I'm still having the same random freezes, as I told in a previous topic. The new drivers didn't fix anything.

Two thumbs down for ATI.

From the release notes I wasn't even able to understand, if these drivers now support 2.6.x-kernels also? It had no version numbers for supported kernels (just "newer kernels supported") and the FAQ still says 2.4.x-kernel is required.

Make, what distribution are you running? What hardware?

The closest I have come to a "stable" system is my full upgrade and reinstall. Took maybe 10 minutes to install the official version of Mandrake and a day or so to download it.

There *IS* one solution to these problems, just install a 2.4.x kernel alongside your 2.6.x, install fglrx to that kernel and set up lilo with the alternate boot options.

It is a huge compromise on your part but it should get things working.

Going to try upping my AGP mode now. If I never come back then something blew up.

Why is it a huge compromise? I can't say that I've noticed some gigantic leap in functionality over the 2.4 series kernels (but then again, I'm using relatively low-level hardware, as you can see from my sig). It's nice not to have to install ALSA anymore, and it's nice to have ide-cd, and it's really nice that supermount finally works right, and it's good to know that I can upgrade to SATA and have a hope that it will work properly, but seriously... what's the big?

As for the ATI problems that you "guys" are having, I'm really thinking that this is either a hardware problem or a kernel configuration problem, as I have used the ATI drivers from versions 3.2.8 through 3.9.0 (but avoid 3.7.0, they're junk) under both 2.4 series and 2.6 series kernels, under Mandrake (9.2 and 10.0 RC2), Morphix (Debian), Slackware, and Gentoo, and the worst thing that ever happened to me was that X wouldn't start because something was misconfigured. Random freezing such as you describe sounds much more fundamental than a simple driver issue.

I would refer you to the ATI Radeon Linux How-To to confirm that your kernel is properly configured for driver installation, and that the driver itself is properly installed.

I just received my brand new Saphire 9600XT last friday , it will replace my aging ATI 8500LE.
I made a plsin clean install of Fedora Core1 and Slack9.1 then installed the Nforce2 drivers on both distros.
Then I installed ATI 3.9.0 on both distros ( using the external AGPGART )
Results:
1) The drivers work fine with both Fedora and slack " direct rendering: YES
my FPS with glxgears is around 3000

2) problem: after installing teh ATI drivers, my Slack distro lost the onboard sound ( I have a lot of messages about missing nforce2 libraries )

That's the first impression.

I installed the 3.9.0 drivers from ATI, as opposed to my previous 3.7.6 drivers. They are MUCH better. Still, I hear Nvidia is kicking ATI butt when it comes to Linux...

I will test them, I have a 9500Pro@NForce 2
At 3.7.6, my old GeForce brought more performance than the Radeon... much more...

motub, given that you probably know more about linux than I ever will, I am following your advice and building a custom 2.6.3 kernel with everything I need neatly compiled in so it has no chance of not loading.

If *THIS* does not stop my random hard-freezes then I will just have to find and compile the intel-agp I am missing from 2.4.23.

It is certainly an issue caused by the fglrx driver, as it simply does not happen unless the driver is enabled and functioning. Good enough reason to blame it on fglrx in my opinion.

Now, how long will this damned thing take to compile?

Wodeh i let mine run overnight. i got tired of waiting.. when i got up the next day it was finally done..
and it still didnt fix my problem.. i still am showing mesa

are you guys using the rpm -i --force fglrx.rpm command?

rpm -i --force
but when i run fglrxinfo
it says mesa.. blah blah blah..

Maybe I should have spent another half an hour unchecking all the redundant modules I will never use.

Looks like I am going to have to leave this going overnight, compiling reams of useless crap...


DAMN

Just as I am speaking it comes up with:

if [ -r System.map ]; then /sbin/depmod -ae -F System.map 2.6.3-7mdkcustom; fi
WARNING: /lib/modules/2.6.3-7mdkcustom/kernel/drivers/video/neofb.ko needs unknown symbol tosh_smm
make: *** [_modinst_post] Error 1

I am guessing this is more useless crap, useless crap which halted my compile no less. Gah!

i think i am gonna try and switch to suse 9.1 pro

That's very odd-- if you were running Gentoo, I would say that you had not done an opengl-update ati... but I don't know what the analagous command would be under Mandrake (and that command would be performed automatically anyway, it being Mandrake).

What I'm thinking is that you have not used the --force switch properly (I'll look it up in a minute, but I have to use Google as I don't have rpm installed ). The thing is, if you have Mesa already installed, and you try to install the fglrx RPM normally, it should refuse to install (because the 3D libraries conflict with the Mesa libraries).

Naturally, if you use the --force command to "force" the fglrx libraries to overwrite the Mesa libraries, the Mesa libraries should no longer be there.

So something is clearly going wrong, since you have managed to install the fglrx drivers without overwriting the Mesa libraries, which should not even be possible. So let's look at man rpm:
The only thing I can see here is that perhaps an -i(vh) --force is not actually overwriting/removing Mesa, whereas a -U(vh) --force supposedly would.

Yeah, it's thin, I agree. But it might be worth running the install the same way as you have been, but using -ivh instead of just -i to see what is really going on (verbose output).

I think the best thing to do would be to uninstall the Mesa libraries, then (re-)install the fglrx drivers, but that might turn out to be more problem than solution (if Mesa takes half of X with it when uninstalled). Sorry not to be more help.