compiling ATI driver

[Markus Deistler]

Hi,

> >>From: Scott Alan Burch <scottb@accom.com>
> Subject: compiling ATI driver
> Reply-To: yellowdog-newbie@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com

> ATI Mach64 GX card I have; it has a .c extension.

Seems to be an old problem, there are postings (lists.linuxppc.org)
saying that ATI-Mach64-based cards *with* IBM-RAMDAC are *not* supported
by XF4.x's atidriver !!! If your card is one of those (my 'ATI Xlaim GA'
is, sigh), bad luck.

To get accelerated 24-bit-video Xpmac has to be installed (see below).
Using the XF4.2's fbdev-driver-module isn't really an alternative (too
slow, just limited number of colors ... ok, there is a strange thing I
discovered for 'fbdev': You may set the default color depth to "15" in
order to get mice 16bit-video, while default color depth 16 results in
weird colors, and depth 8 isn't fun with KDE/GNOME).

> directories, I did find what I am guessing is an uncompiled driver for the
> ATI Mach64 GX card I have; it has a .c extension.
[snip]
> Do I have to compile this code to make the driver for my card?

A compiled atidriver is part of XF4.2 and sits somewhere on your hard
disk. Recompiling wouldn't help much, unless you rewrite the driver
:-));

I got much better and really accelerated GUI-support by returning to old
Xpmac-3.3.6-20b,
XFree86-Xpmac-3.3.6-20b.ppc.rpm can be found here:
http://telia.dl.sourceforge.net/mirrors/linuxppc/linuxppc-halloween/software
(YDL offers an older version of Xpmac in its old champion-1.2-release,
which might also work).

That said, while Xpmac is a solution for ancient Macs with ancient video
hardware, I doubt whether it is good for newer ATI's Radeon stuff :-((

I am just about compiling XF4.3 (or '4.2.99') from source,
(ftp://ppc.linux.or.jp/pub/users/fukui/XF4.3)
I'll try to create a rpm-package and see whether there are any good news
concerning XFree86...;


Best Regards, Markus