Archive for the ‘aiglx’ Category
Compiz Fusion on my Laptop
Posted on January 22, 2008
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.
