Well, wow, if I didn’t expect to get the “anti-Mandriva” coverage based on a previous post. So, as a result, I determined to get the ATI drivers working. The big difference here is that this time I’m using the 32bit Mandriva rather than 64bit; no idea if that’s making a big difference but I did find some help doing more googling (and no, there is no /usr/share/fglrx/fglrx.README with the latest ATI drivers so poo on the guy who said I didn’t read docs).
So here’s a quick HOWTO on getting this stuff up and running (or, at least, how I did):
1) Grab the ATI commercial drivers from the ATI driver downloads page 2) Follow the instructions on how to install it (essentially “sh ati-driver-install-8.29.6.run” and then follow the instructions) 3) Run “aticonfig —initial” 4) In my case, the aticonfig added a second monitor, I suppose that might be the TV out. Doesn’t really matter. The big thing I found was that I needed to set “Composite” to “Disable” in the “Extensions” section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. As soon as I did this, glxinfo and fglrxinfo started telling me that direct rendering was enabled and that I was using the “RADEON XPRESS” OpenGL renderer rather than Mesa. Oh, and make sure that screen0 is set to use the fglrx driver instead of the ati driver (aticonfig setup screen1 to use fglrx, but was still using ati on screen0). 5) You need to install libstdc++5 in order for the fglrx module to load properly (unfortunatley, this package is in contribs); without this I couldn’t get the fglrx kernel module to load (perhaps the ATI dkms packages negate this requirement, but I used the downloaded drivers) 6) Once I had rebooted (to make sure the kernel fglrx driver was loaded), then I could run drak3d and enable Xgl and compiz and get the fancy cube and jiggly windows.
So anyways it works. With Xgl and Compiz enabled, however, fluxbox isn’t very happy. Things look nice and slick in KDE, but fluxbox doesn’t handle it overly well (dragging a window around leaves a trail so your desktop looks pretty messed).
I haven’t tried yet with the dkms-ati package yet. I’ll do that later when I have more time. At any rate, it does work. I think it was that “Composite” extension that was causing me grief the first time around, and none of the sites I looked at before even mentioned it (finally found it in this discussion about FC6).