ATI Drivers on linux

[Cassius105]

Hi

im relativly new to Linux and just installed SuSe 9.2 on my machine with these specs

athlon XP 2000+ (palomino)
768MB PC2100 RAM
Radeon 9700 pro
Abit KR7A Motherboard

all working fine except i cant get 3d acceloration working on the radeon

im using the latest drivers (8.12) and have tried installing them multiple times

at first it was complaining that 3d acceloration didnt support multithread mode(which is eneabled by default on radeons) so i got rid of that but then it just said the card doesnt support 3d acceloration at all

anyone know how to fix this?

or are the ATI linux drivers even worse than i heard and not support 3d acceloration at all?

 

[Nothinman]

The do DRI, but I've always avoided them in favor of nVidia hardware. I did set them up once on a friend's notebook and we didn't have any problems, but we were able to find Debian source packages to build which basically did everything for us.

 

[Cassius105]

yeh i realise ATI aint got a good reputation for linux drivers but its my newly retired box since i got a new system so decided to make it a linux box and was hoping i could at least get 3d acceloration working to a degree

 

[n0cmonkey]

Any errors?

 

[phisrow]

Did you make the appropriate chance in your Xconfig? You need to hunt that one down (for X.org that is /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I don't know what Suse uses these days) and change "ati" to "fglrx". That will enable the binary driver, assuming it is installed properly.

 

[Cassius105]

just tried that

changed "Driver: "radeon"" to "Driver: "fglrx"" and am now nicely in command line only mode

trying to change it back using Vi but cant remember how to save(i used Vi about once or twice before years ago - i dont like command line text editors much)

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Cassius105
just tried that

changed "Driver: "radeon"" to "Driver: "fglrx"" and am now nicely in command line only mode

trying to change it back using Vi but cant remember how to save(i used Vi about once or twice before years ago - i dont like command line text editors much)

Learn vi, there's nothing better (or more ubiquitous).

:w to write
:q to quit

EDIT: stupid emoticons : q without the space to quit, or :wq to write and quit.
EDIT2: I didn't put a capital Q in there. :|

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Cassius105
just tried that

changed "Driver: "radeon"" to "Driver: "fglrx"" and am now nicely in command line only mode

trying to change it back using Vi but cant remember how to save(i used Vi about once or twice before years ago - i dont like command line text editors much)

Learn vi, there's nothing better (or more ubiquitous).

:w to write
:Q to quit

EDIT: stupid emoticons : q without the space to quit, or :wq to write and quit.

Don't forget to hit Escape to get into command mode before entering those (or any other commands). Otherwise you'll just keep typing.

 

[Cassius105]

yeh figured thta out but still didnt fix it still stuck in command line

 

[n0cmonkey]

You still haven't given us anything to work with. Errors?

 

[Cassius105]

there aint any errors as such

just in the graphical configuration panel it sais "3d acceloration not available"

this is even after i have installed the latest drivers

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Cassius105
there aint any errors as such

just in the graphical configuration panel it sais "3d acceloration not available"

this is even after i have installed the latest drivers

If X isn't coming up, there are probably errors. Check the log file.

 

[Cassius105]

Ah X is coming up fine now

that was just a problem caused by the surgestion the other guy gave to change the driver to "fglrx"

the main problem i was asking about is that i have installed the ATI 8.12 drivers for Xorg 6.8 using YaST and still cant seem to turn hardware acceloration on in my radeon 9700pro(which clearly supports it)

when i go to the hardware acceloration panel it sais "hardware acceloration is not available on this card"

 

[Zelmo3]

You can't enable 3D in the SaX2 GUI tool. That's always been the case. Check through the readme for the options you need to configure into /etc/X11/XF86Config by hand. In particular, make sure you "Module" section is loading dri, and that your default color depth is 24.

There's a couple of lines in step 3 that are supposed to write some config options into your XF86Config, but that never worked for me, so if you're still having trouble you'll need to look at the /usr/X11R6/lib/sax/profile/firegl file for what changes it's supposed to make and put those in by hand too. There should be something about "UseInternalAGPGart" followed by a "yes" or "no". You need that line. In most cases it should be set to "no" (definitely the case for nForce mobos).

Try those steps, and look through the readme for anything else that looks pertinent. If it still gives you trouble, write back here.

Also, be aware that if you want to use Cedega on that computer to run Windows games you'll need to downgrade to the previous fglrx drivers. The new ones have texture issues (i.e., some textures don't get drawn and others are the wrong color).

 

[Cassius105]

thanks

i got up to the bit were you reinstall kernel sources and cant get past that

when i do "rpm -Uhv km_fglrx*.rpm" as it instructs i get the message "Error: file not found by glob" and have done a search for the file myself and cannot find it on the HD

another thing i noticed which may be relevent is after you do the config setup it instructs you to remove /usr/src/kernel-modules/fglrx yet i checked just before this stage and there is no kernel-modules folder in /usr/src


i have had several attempts at this but aint really done anything dramatic since as i said im quite new to linux so aint gonna go trying to do anything fancy

 

[Zelmo3]

If you haven't built the fglrx module before, that folder won't be there. It will be created by the rpm command that you tried that gave you an error.
Removing the directory applies to people who already had a previous fglrx kernel module built.

That error is new to me. I've never run into glob before, but it looks like it's just a module that looks for pathnames that match a given pattern. Either you mis-typed the filename or the rpm package is looking for a file that it can't find.
Two things to try:
1) Type in the rpm command using the full filename. Make sure you're in the same directory as the rpm file when you do that.
2) Since you haven't had fglrx drivers on this installation before, try rpm -ihv instead of rpm -Uhv. The U means upgrade, and rpm might be looking for the files that it's upgrading from, which aren't there. The i means install, so it won't look for older versions.

One thing that may get in your way is that the kernel-source package that you install MUST be exactly the same as the kernel you're running (type uname -r to see what it is). If you've upgraded the kernel (using YaST Online Update, for instance) since you installed the system, you might need to dig around SuSE's ftp archive to find the right source package.
On that note, keep in mind that once you have the driver up and running, if you update the kernel it will break your driver and you'll have to go through the install process again to build a module for your new kernel.

Keep at it, let us know where you get stuck!

 

[Cassius105]

yeh it was actualy just me being a bit stupid

i was just apply the guide to the file i got off the ati website and didnt notice that at the top of the guide is a link to download the km_fglrx*.rpm file

does anyone know how ti switch sax2 into run level 3?

its complaining i need to do that but not sure how (aint any details on it in the sax2 manual)

 

[silverpig]

Have you run fglrxconfig yet? On my system it builds an XF86Config-4 file that your driver reads. On my system the steps are a bit different but do basically the same things:

emerge ati-drivers (downloads and installs sources and fglrx module)
fglrxconfig (writes an XF86Config-4 file for you, copy it to /etc/X11... i renamed mine to xorg.conf)
modprobe fglrx (loads the fglrx module)
opengl-update ati (switches to the ati renderer)
<ctrl><alt><bksp> (restarts your xserver, you should now have ati 3d acceleration)

The only thing you'll do differently is the first step. Just gotta get that kernel module built and installed to the right directory.

 

[Cassius105]

yeh ill try re doing it if i can but since im pretty much at the very last stage of the way SuSe surgest i do it i think ill keep trying to find out how to ut it on run level 3 first

 

[Crusty]

I just installed the ATI Binary drivers under Debian last night....

First I went here and downloaded the .deb file for XFree 4.3. Then dpkg -i <driver name>.deb

Then went to /usr/src and extracted the archive tar -zxvf archive.tgz. Once that was done, cd modules/fglrx-drivers/ followed by ./Make.sh

Sat back for a few seconds while the script worked it's magic, once it was done I copied the file over to my /lib/modules/2.6.11/ directory and ran depmod -ae. Then modprobed the driver.

Next, I backed up my XFConfig86-4 in case I really screwed something up, then ran fglrxconfig. Once I was done, I restarted X and I didn't have DRI Acceleration. My problem was my agpgart, I had it built as a module, but i stupidly had the wrong chipset support for it . So I recompiled my kernel to rebuild my agpgart module. I didn't need to reboot since the kernel didn't change, re-ran depmod -ae. rmmod agpgart and fglrx. modprobed agpgart then fglrx and restarted X. It worked beautifully.


Once you are in X, you can run glxinfo | grep Direct and it should spit out "Direct Rendering: yes/no" If it says no then you don't have acceleration, otherwise you do. You can then run glxgears to test your performance, with that system you should almost be getting 3k+ fps in glxgears.

If you have the fglrx module loaded and you are still not getting acceleration, then check your log file under /var/log/XFree86.0.log I believe. Anything with a (EE) in front of it is an error, and anything with a (WW) in front of it is a warning. The biggest cause of problems with getting acceleration is agpgart support. Most of the times, X will fail to initialize agpgart support so DRI will fail. X will also tell you why agpgart failed, so that error is very important. You can also check the output of dmesg to see if there were problems loading either the fglrx or agpgart modules.

 

[Zelmo3]

DON'T USE FGLRXCONFIG WITH SUSE! It's a nice tool for setting up a fresh XF86Config-4 file, but it'll wipe out all of your previous settings, and SuSE does a bit of custom stuff that needs to stick around.
To get into level 3, the best thing to do is CTRL-ALT-F1 (or any of F2 through F6) to get into command-line mode, log in, and give the command init 3. That will kill the GUI, which is what SuSE wants you to do. Then when you're done configuring the driver, you type in init 5 to get back into graphical mode. It should go back into KDE (assuming you're using KDE, which SuSE does by default), but if it doesn't then type in kdm or startx to get the GUI running.