Re: [gentoo-user] Re: vlc dies on GL

[Holly Bostick <motub@planet.nl>]

Richard Fish schreef:

> If you want to try the ati-drivers, generally you just need to merge 
> the package and change the "Driver" setting in xorg.conf from radeon 
> to fglrx.
> 

Not completely true; the ati-driver module (fglrx) will not work if the
kernel DRM is compiled (either as a module or statically). Further, the
driver has an included agpgart, but this does not cover all mobo agp
chipsets (no idea which ones it does cover, but not mine apparently)--
so while the kernel agpgart must be available (preferably as a module,
since the fglrx install script checks this before it will compile),
depending on whether you need to use the internal (fglrx) agpgart, or an
external one (from the kernel; I use via-agp), one may need to do some
kernel voodoo (compiling the correct agpgart for your mobo) or some
xorg.conf voodoo (turning on "UseInternalAGPGART" yes or no), some
/etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 voodoo (to load your agpgart before
the driver agpgart), or possibly even some /etc/hotplug/blacklist voodoo
(to prevent the kernel DRM from loading, because if the kernel loads its
own DRM, the ATI DRM won't load, and the driver does not work with the
kernel DRM). It's quite likely that several forms of voodoo will be
necessary.

Apparently the fglrx module does not work in combination with the
radeonfb driver, either, so if one used that, and the driver did not
work, one might not know why.

In any case, the fglrx requires a specific kernel configuration in order
to work even as well as it does (which may, or may not, be that well,
depending on what you want to do with it), and switching to it is not
necessarily a matter of simply changing the setting in xorg.conf.

Holly
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