Well, I'm not much of a gamer, but id have made Doom3, Quake3 even Quake4, although our hardware doesn't come close to the minimum requirements available for linux. For the full game you still need all the game files from the retail CDs, but download the program/playable demos from http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/. Check out http://www.linux.org/apps/all/Entert.../3D_Games.html, the games section of http://www.linuxpackages.net/ and, ofcourse, google, for more. There are probably a bunch of win32 games you can play under WINE (http://appdb.winehq.org/) too.

Yes, I was just trying those screensavers on nVidia (but similar in spec) hardware - just to see if it mirrored my experience on the ATI hardware.

Hi odevans,

Sorry to talk again on this post, but i´m still having problems on my ATI Radeon video card & Slackware...

After many reinstalls e reconfigurings, I´m trying to let my videocard run nice...

My last tries arent so good, because it is giving some error messages

Last one was when I tried to make all things manually (using your example above)

#sh make.sh seems to run fine
#sh make_install.sh gives following error:

Oh Man, this ATI-Radeon is a pain in the a$$...

are you doing this as root? if you are, there isn't much you shouldn't be able to do.

Have you disabled the Direct Rendering Manager in the kernel? (It's under Character Devices, IIRC). fglrx will *not* load if DRM is loaded or built into the kernel, and it must be disabled, otherwise you will get "Operation not permitted" errors.

I remember having the fglrx working with the DRM, and I switched to the r300 driver and it is still working , but it might be worth a shot...

fglrx used to work with the DRM loaded, but later versions of fglrx broke this and it now conflicts if drm is loaded/ built in.

r300 depends on DRM, so obviously it will work with it.

Yes, I´m running as "root".

Yes, the DRM modules are not loading, like this:

I don´t understand what I am doing wrong...

Well, honestly speaking, I don´t understand almost all that thing, because ATI documentation is very poor !

Looked by any info in hundred of forums and all I had is more questions...

The worst part is: I have made it before, and it worked !!!

Maybe there is a little little detail that I couldn´t find.




Now I´m trying to do this manually:

OK: no errors, and files seems to be copied correctly to their right places...


Ops, there was an warning message:
Next thing to do:
And... errors:






** SOMEBODY, PLEASE HELP ME UNDERSTAND **
(because I HATE not knowing what I´m doing, just following step by step instructions...)

When I configure kernel 2.6.14.3 before compiling it ("make menuconfig"), seems to me that there is already has modules in this Kernel to my hardware.



All right. I do have some dumb questions:

a) Why do I have to use modules from ATI ?

b) Or, why do I have to use ATI drivers instead of /dev/agpgart ?
(if they are not the same thing...)

c) Will I have to do the same thing (module + kernel compilation) with NFORCE drivers too ? I´ve downloaded file "NFORCE-Linux-x86-1.0-0310-pkg1.run". I know, they´re for Net+Sound Cards. But some of my interfaces have no module for it.

d) Anybody knows any decent documentation about all that things ?

It´s a little bit confusing to me, sorry.

Thank ya.

I often find that when you upgrade your GCC to a newer major version without recompiling your kernel you get errors when you recompile your drivers. Did you upgrade gcc? Because that could be the issue then.

I've also found that ATI's drivers have gotten much better recently, but that using newer kernels tends to give problems until ATI releases new drivers. Like right now kernel 2.6.15 is less stable than 2.6.14 for me, and the latest ATI drivers were released after 2.6.14 but before 2.6.15.

Because you want 3D I'm guessing. You can also use the experimental r300 driver which is in xorg 6.9 and later. For my needs I find it works more then well enough (plus it's open source, no kernel tainting).

That's optional, you can choose to use the fglrx internal agp drivers or the external ones, you actually specify that in the devices section of your xorg.conf, either way though you have to have /dev/agpgart and your agp modules (i think). Some people report more fps with the internal, others with the external, for some it doesnt work with one or the other. Depends more on the user.

I tried the nForce drivers waaay back in the day when I was just starting out, and they ended up giving me alot more problems then just using the standard ones, which would be snd_intel8x0 for sound (on nforce2) and the other one for ethernet (forgot about it's name, I have it compiled in).

The best fglrx instructions are from their site, while the r300 since it's pretty recent, has a serious lack of documentation. I wrote up a howto for debian SID, but you can most likely follow more or less the same procedure. Other then that you can read the radeon(4) manpage, the release notes for x.org 6.9 and others for the r300. You can also find about the fglrx pretty much everywhere, since it's been out for a while and had no alternative.

After all changes, even agpgart were not work

But I fix it.

After passing a few hours trying to make things run, I think I´ve found the problem. It seems to be anything about preemption model:

If I set the first or second, boot gives error messages, and does not load any module (even agpgart).

This is weird, because reading the Help of each option, shouldn´t have any problem. But, there is.

So, I let options set like above, recompile kernel, and modules turned back to be loaded.

BUT, when making modules for ATI drivers and trying to load them, it´s still showing errors:

Besides that, the modules fglrx.ko and fglrx_agp.ko are being created.

But they can´t be loaded, because of that error message above !

Some additional Information:

# modprobe -l | grep agp
# modprobe -l | grep fgl
Which modules I must load ? Is there any order ?

Ok, I just installed Fedora Core 4 yesterday and I use the Kernel version 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4. (My first time in Linux)

Today I tried installing the latest ATi drivers that I could found at www-ati-com (8.20.8-i386).

Now, my fglrx shows this for my OpenGL drivers:
OpenGL vendor string: Mesa project: www-mesa3d-org
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect
OpenGL version string: 1.2 (1.5 Mesa 6.2.1)

But when I try to run Quake 3 Arena, I get this message:
You are using software Mesa (no hardware acceleration)!

So I started looking on this forum to find a solution to my OpenGL drivers and found this thread. From what I understand, I have to recompile my flgrx so I tried to execute this 3 commands:
root@box:# cd /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod
root@box:/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod# sh make.sh
root@box:/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod# sh ../make_install.sh

When i type sh make.sh i got an error:
[root@localhost build_mod]# sh make.sh
make.sh: line 40: gcc: command not found
make.sh: line 46: [: !=: unary operator expected
ATI module generator V 2.0
==========================
initializing...
kernel includes at /usr/src/linux/include not found or incomplete
file: /usr/src/linux/include/linux/version.h

Now Im lost =) Any clues?
Thanks

Can't be much easier then this, install gcc. Don't know how to do it in fedora core, but it shouldn't be too hard.

Good, installing gcc the first part, but I'm still getting an error when I enter sh make.sh:

[root@localhost build_mod]# sh make.sh
ATI module generator V 2.0
==========================
initializing...
kernel includes at /usr/src/linux/include not found or incomplete
file: /usr/src/linux/include/linux/version.h

what does it mean??