Just thought I'd share my experience with Xubuntu and getting these DRI ATI drivers working.
I installed Xubuntu a few days ago and I'm happy to say it's running ok for now, still needs considerable tweaking but I'm getting there.
I'd wondered about the 3D acceleration for the Mobility Radeon 7500 (16MB) that I have in this Dell Inspiron 4150 laptop I'm using. xorg.conf has it listed like this, funny as it sounds:
Code:
Identifier "ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 9000]"
Not sure why it sees it as a 9000 but who knows.
So anyway, I do tons of searches here at the Ubuntu forums, the Rage3D forums, Google, etc etc... it gets boring sometimes and it's one primary reason Linux will simply never be as widespread as Windows - it's just too complicated for the average and even below-average user; hell, even diehard computer users get sick of stuff just not working without a great deal of effort.
For myself, I assumed (always a problem) that on this laptop manufactured in 2001 everything would be well supported by now in any modern and current Linux distro.
Boy I couldn't have been farther from the truth if I tried.
But anyway, I did find this thread about an hour ago, spent time reading it several times, hit the DRI page, grabbed the latest "radeon" snapshot there (from April 3rd, 2006) and gave it a whirl.
Suffice to say, knowing how to shut down the damned X server so you can actually install a video driver is a very good thing to know - but I didn't, and now I do. Xubuntu and most distros have that annoying habit of firing the X server right back up as soon as you Control+Alt+Backspace it to kill it. I found a tidbit with Google about changing the run mode to init 1 and that took care of it, followed by init 5 to bring it back up.
The install went off without a hitch, and upon re-running glxgears it went from an average of 650-ish to 950-ish, still not where some other people were reporting. I have a Pentium 4-Mobile (not a Pentium-M) 1.7 GHz so I'm trying to eek out every last drop of performance I can.
I fired up driconf and set it for HyperZ and the hardware TCL; it seems weird that software would be faster than hardware in that respect, but whatever.
Re-ran glxgears and it jumped to the 1600+ range. Good job, I thought, but then I remembered seeing BobRyan's comment about using the software TCL and so I redid the driconf with that option.
Current range is 1800+ so that's about as good as it's going to get I suppose. I use some of the "Device" settings from other posters so that my xorg.conf looks like this now:
Code:
Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 9000]"
Driver "radeon"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "true"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "True"
Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no"
Option "backingstore" "true"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
EndSection
I doubt that I'll be able to get anything more from this setup presently, but if anyone can make any suggestions to get a few more bumps in the fps, don't hesitate to post here with the info.
Thanks to all who shared there knowledge and experiences, it helped me tremendously. Now I just have to get Quake 3 installed to see how well this Xubuntu thing can perform.
Have fun, always...
bb
UPDATE
HOLY CRAP BATMAN!!!
Just for kicks I decided to change the default color depth in xorg.conf from 24 to 16; let's face it, 16 bit is fine for most and color-banding isn't that bad most of the time. Besides, for sheer performances, it's faster than 24 bit will ever be.
Here are the results of just that one change:
11742 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2348.259 FPS
!!!!!!!! Wow. I'm satisfied now, most definitely. If you haven't tried it at 16 bit, go for it. I always play Q3 at 16 bit anyway, 32 bit... bleh
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