no GL in Fedora Core 6 (another ATI problem)

[SteveNTx]

First- you guys are great! I always get the answers I need without posting a question (except now).

Second- I have been using Fedora since Core 3-- so I am well aware of the ongoing ATI issues (and how to fix most of them). Again, thank you for the great advice.

I was running Core 5 on my Dell Dim 4550. After hacking thru the (normal) installation problems with any driver associated with an ATI card, I had a smooth running system with 3D (fireGL) support. I just installed FC6 last week and (of course) cannot get 3D on my Video Card working. I have tried fmod-fglrx from livna, the ati proprietary drivers and every hack and tidbit of advice I can find here.

NOTHING WORKS! No matter what I do, I always wind up with some weird mix of the mesa driver and fglrx. I had desperately hoped this would be easier with FC6, but I am again frustrated. I have the shortcut to ATI config in my system menu, but I always get a dialog box that "Diver does not supprt GL, some functions may not work", and shows the driver as Mesa. This worked fine in FC5, what happened? I am well aware of the myriad changes that can be made to xorg.conf, but nothing works-- I cannot even force it to use fglrx. Anybody know what is going on? With all the hype, I was really hoping FC6 would not be as hard as -5 and -4 to install, but... here we go again.

PLEASE HELP! This is the first time I have ever had to post here!

Steve
Dell Dimension 4550, P4 3.06, ATI All In Wonder 2006 (Radeon 9600), 1 Gig of RAM, 250 Gig Seagate.

[varspigil]

Steve,

Have you checked out this thread?

http://forum.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=121119&page=1&pp=15

I'm having the same problem you are. Had OpenGL and 3d extensions working just fine in FC5, now they don't work in FC6, so I'm having problems with Celestia and Google Earth.

My understanding from what I've been able to piece together is that the proprietary drivers (kmod-fglrx and the proprietary drivers from ATI) don't support OpenGL extensions with Compiz (which is the window manager that gives us all the cool effects). To get the proprietary drivers to give us 3D support, we have to use XGL instead of compiz as the window manager.

The thread above tells you how to install XGL (but note, it's a 41 page thread so who knows what other issues it brings up.

I doubt I'll get this done before the weekend, but if you get a chance to try it, please let me know how it worked for you.

[SteveNTx]

Yep, I'll do that. Thank you for the heads up.

Steve

[SteveNTx]

Oh well, I just reinstalled FC5, and now have everything working again (like fglrx). I have to have hardware accelerated 3D, hence using ati-fglrx. I have no use for fluff like compiz or beryl. Mesa is WAY too slow and processor intensive.

1. kmod-fglrx from livna installs a broken ATI interface only. Mesa was in full control with slow 3D.

2. ATI proprietary installs a broken interface and cuts Mesa to pieces. Mesa was barely in control with VERY slow 3D.

3. Changing the driver in xorg.conf from "radeon" to "fglrx" crashes X on restart. Unrecoverable without reverting back to "radeon".

4. Upgrading from a working FC5 install to FC6 removes "fglrx" completely and replaces it with (what else) "radeon".

5. Removing mesa-libGL, mesa-libGLU and installing kmod-fglrx with yum will remove something like 95 system files (mostly Xorg) and crash the computer.

So (for now) Installing FC6 means being stuck with Mesa (at least on my computer). No response from any one here means no one has any answers. That doesn't make me feel very good.

Steve (using FC5)

Dell Dim 4550, 3GHz, 1Gig RAM, ATI All-in-Wonder 2006 (Radeon 9600)

[DMD]

Same problem here, cannot get kmod-fglrx to work with FC6 but if you downgrade to 8.29.6 fglrx it works fine I have an X1600 mobility card.

[varspigil]

Sigh...I have to Thinkpads running FC6, one T40 and the other a T42p.

It sucks that my 3d programs run better in on the T40 than the T42p...sigh....

Some newer packages seem to improve the situation a little (celestia for example runs better than before) however, Google Earth still sucks on my more advanced hardware.

I may just revert back to the ATI proprietary driver and disable the eye candy...kinda sucks as I like the wobbles, but I'll take application functionality over eye candy...sigh...

[varspigil]

Ok, finally rebuilt my low end laptop (T40) with ATI proprietary drivers and got them working.

For the record here were my issues:

My T40 uses a chipset that is no longer supported by the latest ATI drivers (Radeon 9000) so I have to use the 8.28.8 drivers and nothing later. I also needed to run a legacy script to generate the RPMs that I needed for my machine (and for my kernel).

Here is an excerpt from my installation notes:

- Download ATI 8.28.8 Proprietary driver (www.ati.org)

- Download fglrx-fc6-legacy-generator.sh (thanks to the folks at Phoronix, they rock) (http://www.phoronix.com/redblog/downloads/fglrx-fc6-legacy-generator.sh)

- yum install qt-devel rpm-build

- Copy the driver and the script into a working directory and run the script. The script should generate four RPMS (one of them a kernel module) for you to install.

- Install the modules with rpm -Uvh (RPM name's separated by a space)

- Reboot

- Add the following lines to the end of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "disable"
EndSection

- Reboot

- DRI on the proprietary driver should now work.


Of course, this wasn't the end of my troubles. Google Earth would now hang on startup and Celestia would crash completely.

Instructions to fix Google Earth are as follows (Note: This worked for me but apparently does not work in all cases, in other words YMMV):


- After installing Google Earth, save the file at the end of this link (http://www.ground-impact.com/libGL.so.1.2) and place it in the google-earth folder. This will keep Google Earth from hanging upon initialization


To my knowledge there still is not a fix for Celestia.

Obviously I won't be able to run the desktop effects with the proprietary driver....Among my next projects is rebuilding my T42p so I can get FGLRX working with that.

[leigh123linux]

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "disable"
EndSection

is wrong it should be

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "False"
EndSection

[varspigil]

Changing it didn't seem to have an effect either way.

But I left it with the correction, just in case.

Thanks.
Varspigil