Dancing with tambourine

This little story tells, how I installed driver for ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 under Fedora Core 6. Well, everything worked just fine primarily with the generic open source driver called radeon. The universal linux test for OpenGL glxgears showed that my new laptop processes near 450 fps, that's to say there was no hardware acceleration at all. Offensively. So I went to the ati.com, downloaded their native driver. It doesn't matter that the 'radeon xpress 1100' doesn't even appear in the list of supported hardware, the driver is as generic that it can work with many others. It turned out also that there were the only driver suite for any configuration, and I had to download near 60 MB. So I became a happy owner of a copy of new ATI hardware driver with version number 8.33.6. Very well, we begin shortly. First I have to confess that I've just customized my linux kernel and installed the newest version available at that time, that was 2.6.20. Actually, this let me have spent MUCH MORE time getting the driver to work. 1) Launch $ ati-driver-installer-8.33.6-x86.x86_64.run --listpkg showed that my system distribution should be well supported. 2) But when I tried to build RPM packages, I got first surprise: ati-driver-installer-8.33.6-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Fedora/FC6 .... (lots of compilation errors go here) The short look at the messages revealed that the version 2.6.20 of the linux kernel isn't supported by the driver. Actually, there were no macros _syscallX() anywhere. But deep investigation in the web found out that that problem can easily be solved by defining missing macros either in the source file where they're used or in the kernel source. In my case the latter was more suitable. 3) I tried to build desired RPM packages again. The second problem prevented me from success, it appeared that my system lacks the fireglcontrolpanel application. The web helped me again: the source of the program can be extracted from the driver package and compiled manually. It appeared that to do so, one must solve some easy programming puzzles ;-) 4) At last, I succeeded building RPMs for my system: $ ls *.rpm ATI-fglrx-8.33.6-1.fc6.i386.rpm ATI-fglrx-control-panel-8.33.6-1.fc6.i386.rpm ATI-fglrx-devel-8.33.6-1.fc6.i386.rpm kernel-module-ATI-fglrx-2.6.20-19.02.2007-8.33.6-1.fc6.i386.rpm $ su # rpm -ivh *.rpm 5) At this point everything seemed to be ready to restart X Window system, so I pressed ctrl + shift + backspace. The X server started, but nothing interesting happened. The glxgears showed the same 450 fps, fgl_glxgears refused to start. That was the best time to look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log. There were errors! So I disabled the option AIGLX in the section "ServerLayout" of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. 6) And that was the turning point! The glxgears printed out that my system was able to produce 2000 fps, almost four time increase! Enough about computers. I spent for that process near 24 hours, two times I decided to give it all up. But every time I came back and tried again. This insistency made my success, so I can safely say: "Never give up!"