Radeon mobility 9700 3d acceleration [Solved]

[thexder1]

I have been trying to get some older windows games working on my older laptop using wine and my current problem is that while everything else seems to be working the 3d acceleration is not working. The laptop has a radeon mobility 9700 GPU. I have an athlon 64 3700+ CPU and am using amd64 version of Sabayon. The proprietary drivers do not see the card at all. I read that there are drivers that work in the kernel so I tried to compile the kernel but each time I do the root partition cannot be mounted and I think there is a driver for the hard drive controller not being loaded properly but I have no idea which one I need and I did not remove anything from the working kernel that was related to PATA drivers or file systems. I am using the 3.0.0 kernel.

Anyways if anyone has gotten a radeon mobility 9700 or similar card (radeon mobility 9600, 9500, or 9800) working with 3d acceleration please let me know what you did so that I can get it working. I am not sure what all information is needed as I am not sure where the problem is other than it is probably related to the drivers so I will post information as it is requested

[Fitzcarraldo]

The closed-source driver (FGLRX a.k.a. Catalyst) does not support your GPU: the last version of the closed-source driver that supported it was Catalyst 9.3 back in 2009, and that won't work with today's kernel and X.Org Server, etc. So you need to try the open-source alternatives: either a) the Radeon kernel module (see joost's blog post Getting rid of Catalyst) or b) the X.Org Radeon driver xf86-video-ati (see the post Re: ATI Mobility Radeon X 1700 Драйверы! and take into account that the latest SL kernel is now 3.0.0 [package linux-sabayon-3.0-r10]).

You may find in the second case (b) you need to blacklist the radeon module if the SL kernel image was compiled to load it by default at start-up. If you don't know how to blacklist a module to stop it loading, see e.g. Re: Quit shipping nouveau with the kernel!. you might also have to turn mode setting off (add "radeon.modeset=0" in GRUB 2 in a similar way to what joost explained in his blog post).

I've not tried any of this as I don't use the open-source Radeon driver myself.

[thexder1]

Thanks, I got the kernel module to load and it seems to be working although the games still do not work but that I think is a compatibility problem somewhere with wine, opengl, and the drivers. Not much I can do about that.