Jeff Shultz wrote:
Just in time for my Christmas (or possibly the 9.2 final release?), ATI
has released new official XFree86 drivers for it's video cards. The
version number indicates that they are a minor update of the ones from
the German site.
A couple of possible problems: there is an OpenGL library included that
conflicts with one from the XFree86 install on my installation.
i think this is because XFree86 ships with a built in Mesa 4.0.4 for
some reason - is there some way to have this separate? Or for XFree86
to use the external Mesa? it seems a bit messy to have both in the
distribution - particularly as XFree86 contains gl.h and glext.h headers
which are very old and cause compile problems on some GL apps (I've had
problems with stuff like glaxium until I updated the headers to those
from SGI and Mesa 5.0.2) I know that the built in Mesa is probably
needed for some drivers or such like but it seems particularly clumsy,
although obviously this IS XFree86 we're talking about ;)
Apparently to enable 3D support some mods need to be made involving
kernel headers.... this sounds annoyingly like the nVidia stuff that I
was trying to avoid. I haven't gotten that stuff to install off the
CD-ROMs yet.
I've had no trouble using 3D support with them without the need for
recompile. The only thing I've found is that there could be a bug with
using it with 2.6.xxxx and an athlon xp as it tries to enable some
advanced speculative caching (easily fixed by modifying 1 function in
the source) which causes XFree86 to not load....however on 2.4xx its fine.
Cheers
cris.
