Thinkpad (ATI FireGL T2) installation

[ursusschneider]

Hi everyone,

after installing various distro's I have setteled on Fedora Core 2. Really like it - the desktop is just absolutly sexy ;o)

One of the problems I currently have (and it really gave me grey hairs on all the distro's based on kernel 2.6.xxx) is the ATI Driver.

I am using my Thinkpad T41p in a docking station - the docking station has a DVI out and I have a Philips 180P2 LCD screen connected to it.

What I would like is the following:

1400 x 1050 res when using the Laptop
1280 x 1024 res when docked

as far as I can tell (have looked far and wide ;o) I need the ATI driver to be able to do this (and I would like to play 3D accellerated games) - the drivers on the ATI site only support 2.4.x though.

Does anybody have any idea if this configuration is currently possible? If so, how would I go about installing it - I am willing to "get dirty" when doing this, the only problem is that I am new to linux and am currently really lost :confused:

I did find this link:

http://www.sebastiandierksmeier.de/thinkpad/index.en.html

which lead me to this:

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/X/XFree86/ATI/suse91/fglrx/3.9.0/

and this read-me:

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/X/XFree86/ATI/suse91/fglrx/3.9.0/README

but it is a step-by-step to the installation on SUSE 9.1 -> I even have a copy (bought) of SUSE 9.1 but really like my Fedora installation ;o)

Could anybody perhaps translate the SUSE instructions into Fedora (if that is even possible)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated ;o)

Thanking you all in advance
Ursus

ps: please remember that I am really a newbie - have only used Linux for about 1 month now - and that was just installing the different distros and trying to get ACPI and the graphis-driver to work Surprised(

[marclee]

hi ursusschneider,

have you looked at this...

http://fedorafaq.org/#radeon

...I followed the instructions from there and managed to get the radeon driver working on FC2.

Hope this helps.

marc

[ursusschneider]

hi marc

thank you very much for the pointer - will give it a look ASAP ;o)

Ursus

[ursusschneider]

hi mark

well, I tried it but still get the following error when I get the the sh make.sh line:

ATI module generator V 2.0
==========================
initializing...
Error:
XFree86 drm includes at /lib/modules/2.6.6-1.435.2.3/build/include/../drivers/char/drm do not fit this driver.
This driver is designed to only work with X4.1.0 or higher.
You can match this by getting Linux kernel 2.4.8 or higher.

this was the same error that I got when I tried to install using the ati-readme -> basically I think that it means that the drivers only work for the 2.4.x kernal.

I followed the instructions to the letter - the only difference was that the patch was in a .gz file (I assume that it is some kind of compressed file format) - once I extracted the patch file from the .gz everything worked as per instructions - until I got the error.

Anybody care to help me with this problem?

Thanking you in advance
Ursus Schneider

[marclee]

Hi ursus,

I think I got the same error too at the "sh make.sh" point in the process. I just ignored that error and completed all the steps from fedorafaq.org and it seems to work fine.

marc

[ursusschneider]

Hi Marc

what a nightmare :o(

if I just ignore the error I then get other errors that tell me that accellerated 3D graphics will not be activated - this is exacty why I want to install this ATI Driver in the first place.

Anyway, I then follow the rest of the instructions and basically both the keyboard and the mouse are trashed.

I switched back to the VESA drivers and all is well.

Thank you very much for your help but I just cannot seem to install this driver correctly :o(

Greetings from Austria
Ursus