Gentoo Linux ATI FAQ Luca Barbato Jorge Paulo Tiemo Kieft This FAQ should help users avoid some common installation and configuration issues related to DRI and x11 for ATI boards. 1.0.9 2005-06-06 Hardware Support
Is my ATI board supported?

Almost every ATI board is supported by xorg-x11, at least for the 2D accelerated features. The 3D support is provided either by the DRI project, which is already present inside the xorg-x11, or by closed source drivers provided by ATI.

rage128Rage128xorg DRIr100Radeon7xxx, Radeon64xorg DRIr200, r250, r280Radeon8500, Radeon9000, Radeon9200xorg DRI, ATI DRIr300, followingRadeon 9500 - x800xorg 2D, ATI DRI
GPU Common Name Support
I have an All-In-Wonder/Vivo board. Are the multimedia features supported?

The multimedia features are actually supported by the GATOS project, the GATOS drivers will be merged in the xorg tree shortly.

I'm not using an x86. What are my options?

You have almost the same x11 support on PPC or Alpha platform but you can't use the ATI closed source drivers. That means that you can't use the r300 3d features at all. If you have such a board and you want it supported by x11, you should contact ATI and ask them to open the specs. Recently the AMD64 closed source driver has been released. AMD64 users can use it as the x86 users.

In order to enable the agpgart for certain AMD64 chip sets you have to disable the K8 IOMMU support
I have a laptop. Is my "mobility" ATI model supported?

It should be but you may have a configuration issue due to the OEM PCI id that such chips may have. In most cases you may have to write the configuration file yourself or use the xorgconfig.

Installation
Packages
  • The xorg-x11 ebuild provides the X11 implementation
  • For a 2.6.x kernel the DRI modules can be built with the kernel or be provided by the x11-drm ebuild
  • For a 2.4.x kernel series you must use the x11-drm ebuild
  • The ati-drivers ebuild provides the ATI closed source X drivers and kernel modules, for both the 2.4 and 2.6 series kernels

If you want to use ATI's internal agpgart support instead of the Linux kernel one, the agpgart driver and the chip set specific driver (in your kernel configuration) must be built as modules or not at all.

(If you want just the Rage128 drivers and modules installed with x11)
# VIDEO_CARDS="rage128" emerge x11-drm
(To have just the Radeon support)
(r100, r200, r250, r280, but not r300 yet)
# VIDEO_CARDS="radeon" emerge x11-drm
(To install the ATI closed source drivers)
(r200, r250, r280 and r300 only)
# emerge ati-drivers
(To install just X11 but not install)
(any kernel module)
# emerge xorg-x11
Configuration

It is suggested the use of xorgcfg, xorgconfig or directly by using the Xorg auto configuration option:

# X -configure

For more information on how to get a basic xorg.conf configuration file, please refer to the Gentoo Desktop Documentation Resources.

Users of the ati-drivers can also use fglrxconfig. PPC users could use the Xautoconf stand alone configuration tool by emerging the Xautoconf ebuild, but isn't required.