[gentoo-user] Re: Anyone using xfce4 with compositing turned off?

[walt <w41ter@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 25 Aug 2015 21:10:28 +0200
<wabenbau@gmail.com> wrote:

 	Kernel driver in use: radeon

<gigabytes snipped for readability>

Hi wabe.  This whole radeon thing is so confusing I thought I'd mention
one more very confusing detail that I had to fix before I got the open-
source ati/radeon driver to work correctly:

First I tried starting my X session with no xorg.conf file at all.
That didn't work but of course I can't remember now what went wrong.
(That was already more than 24 hours ago :)

Then I generated an xorg.conf in the old way using 'Xorg -configure'.
That file didn't work right either.

Then I finally realized that the generated xorg.conf had, in the
Section "Device" section, this line:

Driver	"radeon"

But that's not what we want.  To use the open-source ati driver I
changed that line to read:

Driver	"ati"

And that's when everything finally started to work perfectly.

One more thing that confused me:  the xf86-video-ati package doesn't
install any kernel modules.  It installs only these two files:

/usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.so
/usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/ati_drv.so

but to use those files you need that Driver "ati" line in xorg.conf.
<sigh>