My old laptop, as you may remember, was smashed in the same car accident within which I lost my virginity and self-respect. I replaced it with a big-screen laptop which seemed like a pretty good deal.
    Problem was that the thing wasn’t really compatible with Linux; however, I’ve been using OpenSUSE as my operating system since 2006 and had no real interest in switching back to Windows unless absolutely necessary. After much struggle everything as working except for 3-D desktop. Something I cherished.

    My old laptop supported XGL, which is a direct-render 3-D desktop solution. This would NOT work properly with the ATI card built into this laptop.

    I heard of AIGLX and compiz-fusion, an indirect rendering version of the same dealy that XGL did for me. I couldn’t get that working, either. Months go by and ATI released a new version of their “proprietary” driver–a family of code legendary for its inherent crappiness in comparison to nVidia. I tried to update, but lost the ability to support the proper resolution. So I rolled it back, but now 3-D acceleration was busted and but good.

    After many hours, friends, I was finally able to determine that ATI’s installer had, at one point, dumped a copy of its driver (fglrx.ko) into /lib/modules/2.6.22.13-0.3-default/extra, while subsequent versions had placed newer versions of the same file in /lib/modules/2.6.22.13-0.3-default/kernel/drivers/char/drm

    I simply copied the newer atop the older, restarted, and YES! I now have what I wanted.

    Still runs kinda poorly, never exceeding 90fps, but as you can see above I now have 3-D desktop… and its snowing inside.