X weirdness

[amarodeeps]

Hey folks,

"I'm extremely frustrated right now!"

I've calmed down, sorry about the formerly lengthy post. I've shortened it.

Okay, first of all, I have Gentoo 1.4_rc1 running on a g3 powerbook lombard), the 400hhz one. I have the 2.4.20 kernel (gentoo-ppc...this is the only one alsa seemed to work in for me).

Basically, what happened was that I had X working fine at 1024x768 and 24 bit resolution, then I took the laptop to my girlfriends and it stopped working. Looking in the X logs, I saw the message "bad mode clock/interlace/doublescan" and etc. next to '1024x678,' and basically it looked like all it could handle was 800x600. I tried running Xeasyconf a few times, and it gave me nothing: X was still screwed up.

I then decided to re-compile the kernel after poking around the net for a while and realizing I didn't have the correct kernel config for my onboard graphics: I had the rage mobility or radeon or something instead of the ATI Mach64. That seemed to do the trick, I ran Xeasyconf again and all was well.

I was then embarrassed.

I'm still perplexed. There are some things I don't understand, and would appreciate some help understanding: what is the relationship between the kernel drivers and X windows? Why did my X config work at all!? And, one thing I noticed in the Xfree86 log, was a note, something about checking out gatos.sf.net, which is apparently the home of the enhanced Xfree86 drivers for ATI cards...these are used by Gentoo? Last question, which I can't seem to understand, although people ask about it all the time, is: can I get 3d hardware acceleration somehow on X with the Mach64 and GentooPPC?

Or: is there a good FM that I can go R?

Thanks folks, sorry about the outburst earlier.

Dave