ATI Drivers

Next step - get the right ATI video driver installed so I can do the 3d stuff. What I really wanted to be able to do was use AIGLX (Accelerated Indirect GL X) so I could see the cool effects that this allows, like the spinning cube when changing workspaces. It turns out this is not possible with the X1400 card.

AIGLX uses the X composite extension. Compositing allows an entire subtree of a window hierarchy to be rendered to an off screen buffer. This is what makes possible the nifty effects; presumably because the effects are being managed by the graphics card.

There are two providers of Linux drivers for ATI graphics cards - X.org and ATI. The X.org driver is called "radeon", the ATI driver is called fglrx. The radeon driver does not support the X1400 card (as of 7.1) but does support the Composite extension. The fglrx driver supports the X1400 card (as of version 8.29.6) but does not have support for the Composite extension. Therefore, it is not possible to use AIGLX with this card. This sucks. The NVidia linux driver does support the composite extension so, if you can, get an NVidia card. It would have cost me an extra $150 to go NVidia so I passed when I was building my machine.

As a side note, there is another X server implementation called XGL. XGL is a rewrite of the X server that is layered on top of Open GL. It was written by David Reveman under the auspices of Novell and Open SUSE. Support for compositing is built right in to XGL. It is possible to use XGL together with the fglrx driver since XGL doesn't use the Composite extension. I don't know what there is about the Composite extension that fglrx can't work with it, and yet it can work with XGL. If I was really ambitious I could install XGL and get my 3D effects. But, I just don't care that much.

Next post, I'll go over installing the fglrx driver from the livna repository.