Radion 8500 w/ fglxr200 drivers

#1 Perhaps those drivers are no good? are those DRI drivers?

#2 Hmmm I don't know is the answer. I am loading DRI in my XF86Config. I did a 'glxinfo | grep dri', but I'm guessing that wouldn't tell me anything at all since DRI is an X thing not a GL thing. I do know the ATI drivers suck compared to the NVidia ones, but we've known that for a while.

#3 You've come to the right place Pat.

Unfortunately, those drivers are absolutely unsupported. Here's one guy who had the same problem as you (notice the high scores with glxgears).

The fact is Ati doesn't give a rats ass about Linux (or barely does). For some people, these drivers work. For some games these drivers work, but there's a reason they're unsupported. I'm pretty sure that these drivers don't use DRI.

Basically, you've got two options. Buy a Geforce2 gts, or G3, or a G4 (nothing mx for the love of christ). Use their binary drivers. They are stable. They are fast.

Otherwise, you can try the dri drivers. They are being developed by Tungsten Graphics and they are being sponsored by...guess who...nope, not Ati...Yep, that's right the Weather Channel. Anywho, they are still alpha release, but they are improving quickly, as well as stabilizing. They would definitely be more worthwhile to you. You can get the snapshots here.

A couple links on the dri drivers, and the binary firegl drivers: here, here, here and here.

I hope this helps.

#4 Pat, do you have a libGL.so in /lib, /usr/lib, or /usr/local/lib? (The file name may be slightly different.) If so, it might be a problem with SDL. You could try getting the latest version (1.2.5).

Its also possible to configure torque to compile-time dynamic link against GL, but this not preferable (a binary linked in this fashion may not work on many systems).

#5 Another possibility is that the code is just plain using the wrong filename. (Right now it tries libGL.so and libGL.so.1, check out line 106 of x86UNIXGL.cc)

#6 Bah, always something to stand in my way of going 100% Linux. *shakes fist* Alright, well maybe I can get myself a GeForce 4 somehow.

John, my stuff is correct, it's just the ATI drivers :-\

#7 Ive heard success stories of people using DRI... Id give that a try if I were you.

#8 I agree. The DRI for the radeon 8500 has really come around in the last few months, specifically because of the funding. I'd give it a try before you move on. Not that I don't like Nvidia...You're more likely to have a future nvidia card working, then any future ati product.

#9 I did put in the DRI stuff, however all it seemed to do was drop my fps in glxgears by about 2000, and Torque still doesn't work. Also, when I type glxinfo, it tells me that direct rendering is off...I thought DRI was Direct Rendering Interface, maybe I am wrong.

About the nVidia card, I am getting a GF4 4200 for free from a friend of mine for all my help with a CS project that she was going to bomb since she can't use the card. I'd much rather she ditch her boyfriend instead of the card, but you can't always get what you want. (But if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need)

#10 Maybe she'll ditch both :)

#11 If the fps are dropping, and it says Direct Rendering is off, then dri is definitely not working, and you need it to be working in order to use the dri drivers. It shouldn't be too complicated. Go read over the docs, and make sure you didn't miss a step. Make sure you have the right driver loaded in the XF86Config file, make sure both glx and dri are loaded as modules.

#12 Aha! The problem was with SDL...fixed!

#13 Pat, Ati just released official Linux for the Radeon 8500. You should check it out: Driver page

#14 Already did :)

That's why I found out it was an SDL problem not a driver issue, because I put in the new drivers and it still didn't work, and I said, "Wait a second...grrr..." and started digging through platform code.

#15 So, does torque work well with those drivers?

#16 so what was the problem exactly? Was it a compile-time error?

#17 Torque runs great on the 8500 with the new (Nov 20) drivers. It always compiled just fine, torque that is. The problem was during the SDL initlization, it would claim that there was no dynamic GL support. I use Gentoo, and so I had just done 'emerge libsdl'. To fix it I uninstalled SDL 'emerge -C libsdl' then got the latest version from CVS and built that. Another thing that I did was change a line in the SDL code in the GL initilization. Theoretically they both should have done the same thing. Anyhow I'm not sure if it worked before I changed that because I didn't uninstall SDL first so it was looking at the old SDL libraries. I'll do more testing when I get home.

Also, for Radion users, do NOT install Mesa. All you need is OpenAL, SDL and the ATI drivers. If anyone needs help getting this working I can probably help out.

#18 Do the ATI drivers come with there own libGLU.a? Thats why Mesa is required for other setups.

#19 Hrmmm...they do not...where did I get libGLU from? Heh...well maybe the solution is install Mesa, THEN install the ATI drivers. Still not sure where I got libGLU from though :-P

#20 I have had very bad luck installing those drivers. I have a sneaking suspicion that the 4.2 drivers do not work on anything, I cannot even get them to work on the system, in which the 4.1 drivers work on. I suspect this may have something to do with my motherboard/chipset as the drivers compile in their own agpgart code, taken from which kernel and with what defines I do not know, when I experienced failures, they were kernel panics and spontaneous reboots.. both ATI and nVidia share the honor of being the only entities capable of causing my machine to dump like that.

Frankly I'm very sick of these binary only drivers that nv and ATI keep shoving our way, there hasn't been a single instance in which it hasn't been a pain to install them, I don't know what they are hiding in their source, perhaps they don't wish us to see the core TryAndDoSomethingRiskyAndStupidToGetOneMoreFPS(void*) implementation.


Rant aside.

If you are attempting to run the ATI drivers and it appears that it works but you get *no* 3d (run fgl_fxgears), then go to your /lib/modules dir, there deposited so kindly is a dir called fgxlrx, go in there, run the install .sh you see in there, if it fails with a *you must compile* then follow the directions and go into the build directory. *Note* you will need a kernel source tree in /usr/src/linux.. one for your running kernel. Not just headers, and not just an expanded tarball (annoying, headers should suffice), anyway.. go into the build dir and run their shell script.. then back up one directory and run the install script. Run fgxlrxconfig to setup your XF file (do backup your old one first). Then restart.


that's in theory, I have gotten it to work on redhat 7.2, 7.3, 8.0 (XFree 4.1 that I compiled myself, it wouldn't work in 4.2).

I'm using the Glut libs from debian standard, redhat should work, note you will have to force the ati rpm install, it's okay if it overwrites the mesa *.so.


My current box is a debian woody build, following is the procedure I used to install.

boot from deb cd bf24 kernel
install basics
use TaskSel, choose X and GCC
this will give you an X setup
install kernel source
build kernel
download drivers from ATI
install alien
convert the rpm
install it
do the dance in the /lib/modules/fglrx
run the special X config
reboot
run fgl_fxgears


feel free to email me if you are doing this and are stuck, I'll even pop into your box if you are willing and help you out.


-brad

ps filenames and paths may be off or wrong, I'm doing this from memory and unlike tcsh my memory lacks a tab-complete.

pps this is for a radeon 9700