fglrx and mandriva 2006 dont wanna play nice

so after a week of screwing with source based distros (gentoo, lunar, and sourcemage), and some bare-bones bleeding edge binary distros (arch) i had enough and installed mandriva 2006, because after all i have 2005 running on my desktop for about 1/2 year now and its been pretty solid and works great for me.

so i installed it using the net installer overnight, this morning i configured madwifi by building it from svn (as you know madwifi is a club member's only package officially). now its time for fglrx. i did everything like i usually would to get it up and running, but its giving me pain.


as such, if i change my xorg.conf driver from "ati" to "fglrx" and reboot, the computer freezes because it cant load the stupid fglrx.ko module.

ideas?

that problem i resolved, it now loads fine, and now it even starts x with fglrx set as the driver, however stupid opengl is giving hell here


now to decode its wonderful meaning

i got it

this speaks for itself. i got it to work haha, i am getting good at this. i will post my solution just so that if i choose to reinstall mandriva at some later date, or if somebody else needs help, they can hopefully get it here. ------------------------ first things first, FORGET the ati.run package. ------------------------ this is how we do it: add http://mirror.cricyt.edu.ar/plf/mand...e/2006.0/i586/ to your sources (or just go there and download/install) ati-xorg-8.24.8-0.1.20060plf.i586.rpm ati-xorg-devel-8.24.8-0.1.20060plf.i586.rpm make sure you have kernel-sources installed so it can build what it needs. also doublecheck your symlinks so that "uname -r" and "ls -l /usr/src/linux" agree on the version. at this point try to modprobe fglrx. if it loads fine, you're good. change your xorg.conf to "fglrx" reboot once again (don't restart X, actually REBOOT) and hope it works. After it starts run fglrxinfo and if you get some mesa jibrish (like i had in my previous post) then keep going, if it shows you what i have at the top of this post, then you're finished. Now keep going if you get mesa gibrish. Reboot in "failsafe". once it rebooted and X hopefully started, run fglrxinfo and it should give you success. at least it did for me. my theory is that drakx11 (mandriva's xorg configurator) is the culprit when it comes to setting DRI properly. Doing it the Xorg -configure + aticonfig --initial route still pretty much automates everything and solves the problem drakx11 causes. NOTE OF WARNING THOUGH: check your keyboard and mouse settings in the newly generated xorg.conf after Xorg -configure because for me right now, my mousewheel doesn't work right, it acts as "forward" and "back" buttons. EDIT: ------ some 5 minutes of tweaking the mouse through the Control Center solved that issue. dont be afraid to use it, it won't overwrite the parts of xorg.conf that make your ati drivers work. EDIT: ---------- i know have a fully (well, except for media card reader, and possibly IR [not tested]) working linux setup, although be it mandriva and NOT sourcemage, gentoo, or lunar which would have been nicer, hell, its linux, and it works, and unlike previous releases of mandriva (note 2005 takes 2m 10s to boot on my desktop), 2006 is rather fast when it comes to binary distros (a hair slower than arch or vector). the possible tradeoff here is that i am on the official branch and some files are rather old (note: firefox 1.0.6) but on the bright side, at least they are stable. and the fact that i am using xorg 6.9 (not 7, thus i dont believe i can use xgl), and KDE3.4 (not the all new 3.5) but you what what....oh well!