A couple of questions about Radeons. Not troubleshooting.

Sarlok · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jan 2003 Posts: 98

Hey there.

Note: I got carried away writing this, so you can jsut skip to the bottom to cut to the chase. Or read on from here if you're board or curious.

- - - -

I've had my Radeon 8500 for a while now, but gave it to my brother for his geForce 4 when I switched to linux.
I've got it back now and have been playing around with it before I sell my rig (and the card with it).
I'm not sure what I'll get to replace it, but my descision will rely on a few things I hope to find out here.

A Few times, Idid try getting my Radeon working with Gentoo. Most of the times, I failed, and the few times I suceeded, I only got around 500fps with glxgears.

Going through the barrage of posts about Radeon cards and the different ways to install them (I've counted 3 different ones), each I tried tonight and neither worked.

Anyway, I see there's been a lot of added support (supposedly) for ATI's cards, but there are a lot of holes in the information people have given (well, as far as I was concerned at least).

1) What is the most foolproof way to set-up a radeon card? The 3 ways I see are:
. a) the Fireglx rpm (wonk, wonk, wonk

)
. b) building a kernel with radeon support
. c) emerging xfree and xfree-drm and then trying to set it up using the support it supposedly provides.

Please note I said supposedly because in my experiences, neither of those ways truly worked. It wasn't an attack on xfree or anything.

2) If (this is a big if) I were to get a Radeon 9800 pro, and if timeframe was an issue for your answer, let's say in a month on the outside... What sort of support would it have if any? I saw on DRI's website, it's listed in their hardware list. But, that doesn't mean much to me.

3) Is there a readme for setting one up? I've seen and tried a couple in the forums, but neither produced anything positive, or they forgot to mention where you could get a few of the little apps they used to actually set things up.

That's it. Thanks.

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docman

Sarlok · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jan 2003 Posts: 98

Figued I'd bump for one more time round. I'm still looking for answers.

_________________
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jondkent · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 289 Location: London

Let me try.

I've got a 8500 as well, running Xfree 4.3. I've got it working OK using both the kernel (2.4.20-xfs-r3 )radeon modules and using the xfree-drm module. However I've found that the kernel driver (which I setup as a modules) works best for me as I only wanted it to use Blender, which does not like the xfree-drm module, it crashes rather badly.

However, for games I've found that xfree-drm driver is the best to go for. The kernel driver is utterly useless when used with games. So depends what you need it for.

I'm assuming that you changed you XF86Config file to use the radeon driver? There are quite a few options that can be added, have you tried any of these?

Jon

Sarlok · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jan 2003 Posts: 98

Many of them. I tried using the fglrxconfig, tried making my own a few times...
Something always managed to go wrong.

_________________
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jondkent · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 289 Location: London

Ok, well when I get home I'll post my Radeon X config line to see of that helps.

Death Valley Pete · Posted: Wed May 21, 2003 4:04 pm Post subject:

Okay, I almost certainly know less about Linux than you do, but this is what I did (caution: I've never tried Blender and I don't do anything more intensive than glxgears) I build my kernel with agpgart support (as a module, though you could build it in I think), and with motherboard-specific support, but WITHOUT the Radeon drivers. Then I emerged media-video/ati-drivers (you might have to manually specify the path to get the latest drivers). This is, if you were wondering, the equivalent of using the Fireglx rpm, I think. I get something like 1200 fpm on my Radeon 9000 Mobility this way.

One does have to remember to re-emerge ati-drivers after rebuilding the kernel.
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jondkent · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 289 Location: London

Here my Radeon section from my XF86config file

Sarlok · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jan 2003 Posts: 98

I got it to work. yay.

I ended up compiling those ATI modules right into my kernel, and then running fglrx confing using the drivers from ati's site.
But, I still had trouble, even doing that.

Whenever I ran glrxinfo, my driver was always mesa. But, after 2 or 3 reboots, it just magically changed (this is after the initial reboot that came from changing my kernel, installing the ati drivers, and running fglrxconfig).

For future reference, is there some way to manully change the driver that's selected when I run glrxinfo?

And, for whom it concerns, I get about 4100 fps with glxgears. A lot better than 500.

Although, Ut2003 still runs like bovine fecial matter, but then again, everything runs faster in Winex than it did win Windows. :lol:

_________________
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Sarlok · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jan 2003 Posts: 98

Wanted to point you to directions as to how I got it to work today. When I got it workig before, I had to format my system afterwards (just as a general re-instal to clean things up, not because it messed up my system.

)

I put instructions in this thread:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=54793&start=100

Scroll down, or search for Sarlok on that page to get to my post.

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Four-thousand, six-hundred and ninety-one Irradiated haggis.