After many months I decided to enable 3d support.
I have one of those infamous chips, ATI Radeon xpress.

used latest drivers, and now I got the 3d working, but Direct Rendering gone.
re-doing the drivers does nothing.
Prefer both enabled.

Now for what to see:
Xorg.conf....

Section "Device"
BoardName "Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE)"
BusID "1:5:0"
Driver "fglrx"
Identifier "Device[0]"
Option "FSAADisableGamma" "no"
Option "CapabilitiesEx" "0x00000000"
Option "ScreenOverlap" "0"
Option "FSAAMSPosY0" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY1" "0.000000"
Option "mtrr" "off"
Option "FSAAMSPosX4" "0.000000"
Option "ForceGenericCPU" "no"
Option "FSAAMSPosX5" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY2" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAScale" "1"
Option "FSAAMSPosY3" "0.000000"
Option "Capabilities" "0x00000000"
Option "GammaCorrectionI" "0x00000000"
Option "no_accel" "no"
Option "FSAAMSPosY4" "0.000000"
Option "UseFastTLS" "0"
Option "FSAAMSPosY5" "0.000000"
Option "FSAACustomizeMSPos" "no"
Option "FSAAEnable" "no"
Option "BlockSignalsOnLock" "on"
Option "GammaCorrectionII" "0x00000000"
Option "KernelModuleParm" "locked-userpages=0"
Option "FSAAMSPosX0" "0.000000"
Option "no_dri" "no"
Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no"
Option "PseudoColorVisuals" "off"
Option "StereoSyncEnable" "1"
Option "FSAAMSPosX1" "0.000000"
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
Option "FSAAMSPosX2" "0.000000"
Option "Stereo" "off"
Option "FSAAMSPosX3" "0.000000"
Option "CenterMode" "off"
VendorName "ATI"
EndSection


Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Layout[all]"
InputDevice "Keyboard[0]" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Mouse[1]" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Mouse[3]" "SendCoreEvents"
Option "Clone" "off"
Option "Xinerama" "off"
Screen "Screen[0]"
EndSection


Section "DRI"
Group "video"
Mode 0660
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "DAMAGE" "false"
Option "Composite" "false"
EndSection

and the glrx snippit
Xlib: extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":0.0".
direct rendering: No


Thanks for your time (hard to search for this).

Does the modules section have a
load "dri" ?

Did you remove the drive before you tried reinstalling it?

Which distribution are we talking about? From the looks of it, I would say Suse but I can't say for sure.

Did you

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep WW

to find out more?

yes it's suse, and yes I removed the drive and everything.

but when I was just screwing around with it in xterm

i just typed
ldconfig
and that eventually led to me changing sax

basically all in all they both work now.
still not sure what happened or did.

But thanks anyways.