DRI driver installation for ATI Radeon


These instructions explain how to install the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) drivers for ATI Radeon graphics cards to enable the direct rendering extension required by Project Looking Glass.

Installation Instructions

Here's a guide for installing the binary ati-drivers on a non-rpm based distribution such as Slackware. I'll be referring to the commands needed with slackware but most steps can be applied for other distributions as well.

Note: All recent releases (> 3.12) of the fglrx drivers contain an incomplete implementation of GL. So it might be that lg3d is not running correctly with these drivers. If you experience problems, please try the other installation instructions.

  1. Become root:

    % su -
    Password: enter root password
    #

  2. Install the kernel sources from the kernel-source package of the distro:

    # installpkg kernel-source-2.4.26-noarch-4.tgz

    Note: In the Slackware distribution the package is on the first cd in the set.
    /mnt/cdrom/slackware/k/kernel-source-2.4.26-noarch-4.tgz

  3. Update the kernel configuration and dependencies:

    # cd /usr/src/linux
    # cp /boot/config-ide-2.4.26.config
    # make oldconfig
    # make dep

    Note: You don't need to recompile the kernel.

  4. Download the latest ATI Radeon drivers from the ATI web site.

  5. Convert the rpm to a ordinary tar.gz file with:

    # rpm2tgz fglrx-"version".rpm
    # cd /
    # tar zxvf fglrx-"version".tgz
    # cd /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/
    # chmod +x ./make.sh && ./make.sh
    # cd .. && chmod +x make_install.sh && ./make_install.sh

  6. Run fglrxconfig to setup X:

    # fglrxconfig

  7. On Slackware 10 as well as any other distros that uses xorg instead of XFree86 you'll have to make a symlink between XF86Config-4 and xorg.conf:

    # ln -sf /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 /etc/X11/xorg.conf

    Now try to start X, unless you ran into any errors in the previous steps you should have working 3D acceleration now. Verify this by running:

    % glxinfo | grep render

    You should now see:

    direct rendering: Yes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Lucian Cionca lucian.cionca@gmail.com for writing the original guide, thus providing an initial framework.



$Revision: 1.8 $ $Date: 2005/01/30 15:54:38 $