[plug] ATI fglrx drivers

[Hendrik Strydom]

Some hours late for the meeting yesterday my brain seems to have finally
come online to some extent.  (I'll blame it on the fact that I generally
use nVidia hardware which have much less subtle hints :-)).
The ati binary driver, fglrx needs a kernel module (also named fglrx) to
support 3D graphics, but 2D works quite well without it. 
 
The advantage of this is that your X keeps working after a kernel
upgrade (unlike nVidia), so you still have a gui to browse the net etc.
The disadvantage for a mostly nVidia user is that the problem and
resolution is more subtle, and generally the ati drivers keep their
inability to compile the module to themselves.  
It is however possible to manually compile the module for the currently
running kernel.  In this way you know with reasonable certainty whether
it is going to work or not.

For background, I run 64 bit FC4 on a Turion64 notebook with an ATI
Radeon XPRESS 200M graphics controller (the low end of ATI).
These instructions are for the binary driver supplied by ati, either the
generic .run package or the .rpm. I see no reason why the .deb will
behave differently, but have not confirmed this.
The source for the fglrx module is stored in /lib/modules/fglrx (at
least on my FC4).  Somehow you need to perform a two stage build and
install from different directories.
To attempt to compile the module do:
cd /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod
then 
./make.sh
If the script reported no errors the fglrx.ko symlink in the same
directory should point to a real file, nowadays typically 2.6.x/fglrx.ko
In this case install it with:
cd /lib/modules/fglrx
./make_install.sh

and after (re)starting X 3D acceleration should work.  
Note that glxgears mostly crawls without 3D acceleration, whereas the
ati supplied fgl_glxgears does not run at all without the module
present.  It is also quick to see if the module is loaded with:
# lsmod | grep fglrx
which returns something like
fglrx                 537596  7
if it is loaded.

Also note that the ATI driver does not work for Fedora kernels beyond
2.6.15-1.1833_FC4, i.e no later 2.6.15 or 2.6.16 kernels.  This may not
affect stock kernels since Redhat patches kernels extensively, or there
may be some patches out there to fix this. I have seen hints of debian
patches, but have not followed up since I have no debian on ati
hardware.

Regards
  Hendrik