ATI driver problems. Not the usual

[xenthro]

Well... I've been running fc5 for a week now. I cannot get my ATI drivers for my radeon 9600 agp to work. History.

Ubuntu: 5 months of not being able to configure the drivers. read dozens of forums. Just stuck with win2k for playing games. Tried the included drivers, expanded repository packages, messing with driver settings, xorg-conf settings, etc etc.

Knoppix games edition: it found my card but never managed to auto configure. Figured there was some weird variable in debian programming that was out to get me.

FC5. updated my repos for livna. entered
yum --enablerepo=livna-testing --enablerepo=updates-testing install kmod-fglrx
rebooted. kernel works fine. fglrxinfo gives me

display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: Mesa project: www.mesa3d.org
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect
OpenGL version string: 1.2 (1.5 Mesa 6.4.2)

... just like all of them. I went into xorg.conf and changed the "radeon" driver to "fglrx" and still nothing.

xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "fglrx"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AP [Radeon 9600]"
EndSection

Who in the world can solve this problem? I uninstalled windows completely. Please help me so that i don't have to go back.

3ghz
1024
ASUS ASRock P4VM800
ATI radeon 9600 128mb

[theedge981]

What is the exact error you're getting that you can't use fglrx? Are you getting the error when you try and startx? Can you try `modprobe fglrx`?

[xenthro]

I get no error. it just does not work. when i update drivers it is as if nothing had happened, except that I have a few more files. the command "modprobe fglrx" does nothing for me...

[rivierakid]

see: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=100136

[xenthro]

did that. like I said, its not the usual.

[xawen]

I got to the same point with the same process and had no errors, it just wasn't working.

Set the driver to fglrx Check glxgears again and see if the framerate is really low (lower than with the radeon driver), then take a look at glxinfo and see if it still says Mesa for the GL accellerator. If both of those are happening (and believe me, I mean both) try this...

Delete libGL.so.1 and libGL.so.1.2 (make sure not to touch the libGLU files) from /usr/lib/. You probably want to back them up first... Then copy libGL.so.1 and libGL.so.1.2 /usr/lib/ati-fglrx to /usr/lib/.

Reboot and see what glxinfo and glxgears say...

The problem with my system was that the GLX drivers are different for the ATI drivers than the open source driver and for some reason the links aren't getting update. I will warn you, I have no idea what problems this will cause when the official kernel update and livna drivers come out...

[xenthro]

strange thing... I followed your advice. I reinstalled fglrx as the driver. the libgl.so.1&2 were automatically moved to the at-fglrx directory. glxinfo still says Mesa. What's strange is that when I run gears, the 1st second the gears are spinning smoothly and after that... choppy as hell. FPS deteriorates steadily from there. what could it be?

[xenthro]

another odd thing... when I run the cedega tests and test the 3d acceleration, it shows me the gears, which are running seamlessly, but still says that it failed the test. What...?

[Gwe]

Xenthro, I had a very similar issue (that is, installing xorg-x11-drv-fglrx and kmod-fglrx-smp with yumex, getting slow glxgears/fgl_glxgears and having fglrxinfo display Mesa, eventhough I did the trick with /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2) and here is how I solved it:

I read in another thread that yumex has some problem installing the driver and module package from livna, so I uninstalled them and reinstalled them with yum. Then, I still got fglrxinfo display Mesa but I noticed that the driver and module were loaded at startup (I got the Starting ati-fglrx [OK] message). So I did the trick with /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2 and got the 3D acceleration.

Now I know that you haven't used yumex to install the driver and module, but the first thing you must look at is why they don't get loaded at startup. Here is a few things you can check :
- look for an ati-fglrx start script in your runlevel 5 directory (/etc/rc5.d/S{n}ati-fglrx)
- look in your Xorg log (/var/logs/Xorg.0.log) for any error message containing fglrx. I had that particular error:
(II) Reloading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/linux/libdrm.so
drmOpenDevice: node name is /dev/dri/card0
drmOpenDevice: open result is -1, (No such device or address)
drmOpenDevice: open result is -1, (No such device or address)
drmOpenDevice: Open failed
[drm] failed to load kernel module "fglrx"
- check if 'lsmod | grep fglrx' returns a line or if 'modprobe fglrx' returns a FATAL error.
These are signs that the driver and module installation were not properly completed.

Hope it helps.

[xenthro]

28242 frames in 5.0 seconds = 5648.330 FPS
I owe you a drink. I had the exact same error in my Xorg.0.log. I uninstalled the driver and the kernel module with yumex, restarted, installed them both with yum, restarted, and voila, penguin racer! I didn't have to move the libGl.so or anything

you sir, ROCK.
5 freakin' months!