3D accel - Debian "Sarge" on IBM T41

[Megahurts]

Hi,

First of all this is my first post, so apologies for it not being in the correct place....

I've played around with various distros for a couple of years, but never really did more than install them, get myself online and then have to reformat and reinstall The Beast from Redmond cus the kids didnt like the lack of easy-install games/messengers/demos off coverdisks/virues/spyware/malware etc etc.

However, my employer has seen fit to provide me with a nice shiny laptop to play with and since I also have a spare 2.5" HDD sitting around I thought I'd give Debian a try thats to the "Which distro is best for n00bs" thread....

I'm trying to enable direct rendering under XFree86/Debian Sarge on a IBM T41 laptops with an ATI Radeon Mobilty 7500 chipset. It only started as a "I wonder if I can get this working?" type thing to try and learn a bit more about how everything hangs together, but has since become an obsession and to be quite honest its driving me slowly insane....But I *have* learned a lot :)

I've googled to the point of madness for various combinations of "Radeon", "7500", "Debian", "Linux", XFree etc etc but seem to be going round in circles and have not yet managed to get HW acceleration. glxinfo reports "Direct Rendering: No" using every setting I've tried (Sorry I can't post proper output captures at the moment, as I'm at work and being forced to use Windoze).

Has anyone installed Sarge on a T40/T41 and got the HW Accel. working?

Regards


Paul

[XiaoKJ]

Well, you must be a brave soul to try out so far on yourself....

But I'm sorry I don't have an experience with ATI chips.

Are you able to load flgrx or something? And have you tried the newest ATI drivers for linux? I've heard that they have improved...

Cheers

[Megahurts]

I've tried the flgrx drivers, but they only support cards > the 9000......

[DimGR]

ATI does not support anything lower than a 8500

[philtesone]

same here, I don't know much about ATI but I have tried two other debian based distros that fixed alot of things I couldn't get working with debian alone

Mepis 3.3 has a check box for ATI driver on it's HD install
and ubuntu should also fare ware with that laptop just fine. . .(I originally installed ubuntu on a Dell Latitude which had an ATI Mobility and it worked off the first install- chromium worked perfectly!)

anyways, good luck and remember the Linux community is always there to search and seek for answers. . .

[fallen0047]

Try Ubuntu. It detected my ATI Radeon card and did 3D accel. just fine with the tweak suggested in the support. (I spent hours (lots) trying to get my ATI AIW card to work under Sarge: without success). If you choose to do this, read https://wiki.ubuntu.com//BinaryDriverHowto
and follow the instructions. It worked great for me. I can't watch TV, but I can play tux racer, which is better than TV any day. :)

[Megahurts]

Thanks for the advise about Ubuntu, I d/l'ed and installed Hoary last night and HW 3D accel. worked straight out of the box as it were, Glxgears now gives 500+ fps rather than the 230ish under SW accel. :)

I'm still at the "pushing buttons to see what they do" stage, but I'm not sure I like using sudo rather than su - its a pain from the console, and it took me the better part of 45mins to find out I was supposed to use my own password when using it.....

All I need to do now is try and figure out what the differences are between my Sarge and Hoary installs......