rgregory

Be.Gurmeet.Be, I don't think your mainboard has anything to do with it, and no one here can fault you for wanting to keep your Linux

When Installing SuSE (IME), it is only necessary to run sax2 once during installation to set up the VESA driver initially. Later, after installing fglrx, use fglrxconfig to configure, NOT sax2.

Use the commnd "modprobe fglrx" (as root) to load the fglrx module. Check dmesg immediately afterwards to make sure there were no errors.

When you try to start X using fglrx (now that the module is loaded and X is configured), look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log for the following messages:

"Acceleration [en|dis]abled"
"Direct Rendering [en|dis]abled"

If either of these are disabled, then the X log should contain some message that explains why.

NOTE: Whether you want 3D or just 2D, you still need the fglrx kernel module to load. Furthermore, advances in X.org will soon make use of OpenGL rendering for 2D functions. I don't know too much about it yet myself, but I have heard others talking about it. Uberlord might know what I'm talking about

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Robert Gregory
Software QA Team Lead, Linux Software Engineering
ATI Technologies Inc., Markham, Ontario, Canada

UberLord

rgregory is talking about cairo
http://cairographics.org/introduction

Basically it puts the "bling" of Apples OSX Quartz and Microsoft Windows Vista Avalon into X via OpenGL.

So you get your basic 2D rectangles (window borders, panels, buttons, widgets, etc) handled by your GPU instead of the CPU. In theory cairo drops back to software rendering if your GPU does not support the requested feature.

A really big plus of this is the ability to get accelerated transulcent windows

However, I disagree with rgregorys assumption that you need the fglrx kernel module to load. You don't need it for 2D, but you don't get any accelerated 3D. I had to forgoe using the fglrx kernel module on my old ASUS motherboard as it caused strange issues regarding 2D which were never fixed or acknowledged by ATI - so I sold the kit after a year of waiting and now it loads fine on my new AMD64 system. So I get accelerated 3D now - yay

And if you still have problems with fglrx loading, I know that the dri project has good R200 support (my IGP chipset which I think is a crippled R200 derivate has good working accelerated OpenGL) and I suspect it will work with your XPress too. However, you don't get the patented thingies like S3TC and others.

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rgregory

Thank you Uberlord, I stand corrected. You do not need the kernel module for 2D. I thought because the OpenGL ICD is provided by a different library (fglrx_dri.so), the fglrx.[k]o was still required for 2D; not so. My mistake.

However, you still need to see "Acceleration enabled" in the X log to confirm that 2D acceleration is present. Here is the relevant text from my own /var/log/Xorg.0.log (using RADEON 9600):

(II) fglrx(0): Using hardware cursor (scanline 1024)
(II) fglrx(0): Largest offscreen area available: 1280 x 402
(II) fglrx(0): Using XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA)
Screen to screen bit blits
Solid filled rectangles
8x8 mono pattern filled rectangles
Solid Lines
Dashed Lines
Offscreen Pixmaps
Setting up tile and stipple cache:
30 128x128 slots
(II) fglrx(0): Acceleration enabled

Be.Gurmeet.Be, please let us know if you see anything like this in your X log

Hope it helps.

__________________
Regards,

Robert Gregory
Software QA Team Lead, Linux Software Engineering
ATI Technologies Inc., Markham, Ontario, Canada

Be.Gurmeet.Be

Dear , UberLord' & 'rgregory' and all the members of this great forum.

I got SUCCESS. I am so happy today. Finally, the efforts of my one month's endless exertions PRODUCED fruit for me.

but , Infact, i had to to make a compromise with Linux for it. I mean to say that i had to install x86 (32 BIT ) Linux on my AMD 64 BIT Computer System then ' fglrx ' drivers installed and worked successfully.

Hey Guys , have understood every thing perfectly. The problem of this entire mess lie in 32 BIT and 64 BIT Distros version.

Infact, ( I talk about SuSE ) in SuSE 9.3 x86_64 ( 64 BIT ) , two important modules are not installed by default which are indispenable to install ' fglrx ' driver. These Modules are:

1. ati_agp
2. agpgart.

without these two modules , installation will be fail all the time. And most of the linux users (especially Newbies) do not know how to install these MODULES manually.

But 32 BIT SuSE distro automatically install these two modules in the system by default.

So i installed 32 BIT SuSE 9.3 Professional on 64 BIT system and chased the following steps...........

1. I mounted the ' POSIX ' memory in the system. To do so I added the following line in /etc/fstab file and saved the file................

tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

after that i executed the following command in console...........

># mount /dev

2. Then I made sure that the following pakages are pre installed in the system :

A. glib
B. xfree86 4.3 or Later and xorg 6.8.0 or Later
C. Kernel-Source Package.
D. Kernel-Module for ' fglrx ' Driver. [ Search Yast ]

after that,
3. I just installed " fglrx_6_8_0-8.16.20-1.i386.rpm " [ Because i have 6.8.x or later XORG installed in my system ] To make sure download ' check.sh ' file from ati's site and run it as following.....

># sh check.sh

After installtion of driver package...........

4. I executed ' fglrxconfig ' command , and set almost all the options to default except
Hsync and Vsync of Monitor. The value of these two option user must enter himself. rest of the options just press " ENTER " & " ENTER " and "ENTER "

that's it.

after that reboot the system.............Drivers will be installed successfully.

5. To Check if ' fglrx ' installed i just executed the following commands............

># lsmod

or

># modinfo fglrx

or

># fglrxinfo

etc. etc.

NOTE: YOU NO NEED TO GO TO COMMAND PROMPT TO DO THESE ALL THE STEPS , NO , NEVER, DO IT IN GUI BUT GIVE THE COMMAND IN ' console ' or ' gnome-terminal '

SO FINALLY,

I WOULD LIKE TO SAY TWO THINGS....

1st .......... PLEASE ASK ME IF ANYBODY WANTS TO INSTALL 'fglrx' DRIVER IN 32 BIT VERSION OF LINUX , OTHER WISE ,

TELL ME , HOW TO INSTALL IN 64 BIT VERSION OF LINUX.

REGARDS AND THANKS TO ALL OF YOU.

I HOPE OUT RELATIONSHIP WILL BE PERPETUAL THROUGH THIS FOURM.

-
Be.Gurmeet.Be

masanlop

Basically, I have the same system and the same problem yet! I just installed the latest driver version fglrx64_6_8_0_16.20, build the custom one for my system SUSE9.3 (up to here, everything perfect) , rebooted and got a blank screen that does not even let me switch to console mode. so I guess IŽll need to switch off the laptop! Desperating, as lastest ATI release notes finally do list explicitly the Xpress200 as card this driver is valid for...On the other hand, if you issue rpm -qi with the new custom build rpm no reference to Xpress200 appears. This makes me thing it is still an unresolved issue.

Please, rgregori, could you explain how/where should I get the "other" agpgart module, e.g.amd64-agp.ko? Just to make it easier to follow, let me summarize my system specs:
Compaq Presario R4025CA, AMD64, SUSE 9.3 2.6.11.4-21.8-default, of course with an Xpress200M [img]images/blue_heaven/smilies/wink.gif[/img]
Thanks!