A question about ATI and AIGLX [Solved]

[Flibberdy]

I'm contemplating "switching" from Gentoo to Sabayon via a full reinstall (I've broken my Gentoo to the point that I have just decided to nuke and reinstall) and I was just wondering about Sabayon, Compiz Fusion and my ATI 9800 Pro card.

Can anyone confirm if I can use AIGLX and this card with Compiz without a huge amount of mess?

I'm a competent user of Gentoo so I'm not averse to tweaking, but I'd still like a less headachy setup than with Gentoo.

I know this card works with fglrx and XGL but I really want to avoid the proprietary driver route as far as possible (simply because XGL is way too slow for my liking)

Thanks for any input on this matter,

Flibberdy

[Darksurf]

Well, I must say, I've used ATI for a long time and if you have the older ATI cards that use the radeon module (open source driver) and not the fglrx driver (proprietary AMD driver) U are pretty well off. But if U use the fglrx driver U just have to keep waiting for the next driver month after month to see if there are any improvements and movements to AIGLX. As for compiz fusion.... its still in alpha mode... there are no garuntees, but it seems that many people are able to use it OK.

[edgevision]

I know that few people have any luck with ATI/AIGLX, mostly because AIGLX is not compatible with the closed-source ati-drivers (the ATI drivers don't implement the DRI API properly to do so.)

If you want to use AIGLX at all on your ATI card, you must use the r300_dri driver. See here for more information.

Also, XGL runs very well on the 9800, especially if you use Loose Binding.

[Darksurf]

I must say I found good news!! For those of us who use an ATI Radeon X200M video card and are getting sick of messing around with the fglrx drivers. Our answer may be on it way!!

"As of June, 07, 3D acceleration of the ATI Xpress 200M is in a (very) experimental state and although it works with AIGLX, (I get 1500 fps) complicated OpenGL programs will not work with it - this includes beryl, compiz and compiz-fusion. An alternative compositing manager like xcompmgr/metacity works well however."

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_DRI_with_A ... ce_Drivers

I'm going to go look up some more over this topic to see how the opensource X200M drivers are coming along.

[Darksurf]

I went and check out DRI's homepage and your card is supported. So use the opensource drivers and You can have aiglx

look here for a list of what cards the open source drivers support. It seems to have expanded since the last time I looked at it which was quite some time ago. up to the X800 is supported in some areas.... Thats kinda surprising. They're still working on the X200M though... Oh, well they have fixes in the git version they just haven't been tested properly yet. I'm waiting for this, so I'll be paying close attention to this project.

if you have an ATI Radeon X200M based off of the RV370 chipset version you can have aiglx support with opensource drivers. unfortuantely the newer X200M/IGP cards are based off the RS400 which is better, but they're still working on the drivers for this card type.

[Flibberdy]

Thanks for the info. That list has changed indeed. Might be time to delve into the 3D desktop world again. Last time I used Beryl was like 9 months ago with a really buggy SVN version..

Now to free up enough hdd space to burn myself a Sabayon DVD