xorg-x11 ati drivers

[Per Bjornsson]

On Fri, 2004-10-29 at 18:03, Joshua Andrews wrote:
> For years now I have been having major pains with Gatos and Red Hat.

Funny, I actually had decent luck when I was playing with this a few
years ago, actually just dropping in the Gatos driver binaries. I don't
think that there was ever a setup that would do both 3D acceleration and
video capture for the Rage128 (which I had) though.

> It 
> seems the Gatos development is mostly aimed at slackware and since Red 
> Hat kind of goes in its own direction with the kernel and such it has 
> never been stright forward getting radeon multimedia stuff working. 

Well, the old Red Hat Linux kernels were pretty heavily patched, and in
order to avoid regressions the FC1 kernel was too, but the 2.6 FC2+
kernels are really pretty close to mainline, so patching stuff should be
much easier nowadays. In any case, I'm pretty sure that you shouldn't
need a patched DRI driver any longer; the km kernel module should likely
work just fine in the Fedora kernel although I haven't tested it.

> I 
> have been building kernel modules, building XFree86, etc. until I have 
> finally given up with Fedora's short life cycle. When I read that Gatos 
> was finally merging with xorg I was really hopefull. Oh well! Anyway, 
> I'll wait for FC3 and maybe give it another shot merging it into Fedora 
> xorg-x11 sources.

I think the way to go is to grab the FC3 SRPM and replace the base
tarball in it with the current X.org development tree. You'll need to
figure out what patches are still needed, and possibly adjust them,
though. At least the situation should be much better than it was with
XFree86, IIRC there were tons of local fixes in those...

Good luck,
Per

-- 
Per Bjornsson <perbj at stanford.edu>
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University