[Guide/Help] Linux Fedora Core 5 ATI RADEON graphics problem

[Maz]

Hi dee ho again peeps.

I encountered some problems when I tried to play some of the freeware games on the site with my Fedora.. Well, problems weren't caused by the games though =)

Symptoms were that whenever I tried to play a game which had decent graphics, my computer turned out to be slow as a snail...

Problem was that my ATI-RADEON card was not working well. (I have radeon 9600). Or actually direct rendering was not working.

If you experience similar problems, you can try out command

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glxinfo | grep "rendering"

If you get a line

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direct rendering: Yes

Then the problem is not same I had and you can stop reading.

If it is

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direct rendering: No

Then it might be...

Anyways, what I did was following:
I installed kmod-fglrx packaga (lernel module) with yum-installer from Livna repository. I have heard that if nVida drivers are installed, they must be removed before installing ati drivers.

(I believe I have some instructions/explanations about yum somewhere in here...)

Beware. This is also likely to update your kernel version, if you do not already have newest kernel... And in that case, other kernel modules (like support for mounting ntfs partitions) may not work.. Anyways, if you use Grub boot loader, I believe that yum automatically creates new entry for booting the new kernel in boot menu, and leaves the old kernel to be selectable too. Anyways, I will not give any guarantees, so proceed with your own risk. NOTE: If the kernel is updated, then you need to boot on it before going any further.

Installation and rest of the things must be done as root user.


Then I gave command

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setsebool -P allow_execmod=1

so SELinux allows things to work (BEWARE, changing SELinux configurations may make your system more vulnerable against attacks and your own mistakes).

Then the ati-radeon driver must be enabled... In order to do so you must shut down X-windowing system. It can be done by changing to init state 3 with command

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init 3

(Now you need to relogin).

Command to enable new driver is

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ati-fglrx-config-display enable

And then you can go back to init state 5 with command

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init 5

Unless you have Intell's mobo, this should be enough. Now the glxinfo | grep "rendering" should show that rendering is enabled.

I have heard that with Intell motherboards you need to change your x.org configuration file as follows (I do not have intell's mobo, so previous steps did the trick for me)

open /etc/X11/xorg.conf file with your favourite text editor (vim is the only real editor though )

Find line

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Driver "fglrx"

and add after it line

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Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no"

Save file, restart X and try it out.