Compatible Video Cards for SL Alpha?

I am running Suse 10 on a homebuilt machine, AMD 64 3200+, 1 gig of RAM, sata drive, gig copper ethernet etc. A halfway decent rig such as it is.

The problem appears to be that my video card (ATI RV280 5961) cannot do the 32-bit color depth under linux required for the client.

2006-03-26T17:48:33Z WARNING: Unable to create window, be sure screen is set at 32-bit color in Control Panels->Display->Settings

I checked in Control Center and indeed it is running 1280x1024 SXGA at 24 bit color depth, with no option in drop down to select 32 bit color depth.

So unless someone knows of a different combination of resolution/X (1600x1200 UXGA, etc) I am out of luck on this rig to run the SL client. Or is there a better set of drivers to use? Is there or going to be a "compatibe video cards" list somewhere?

Looking through other threads it is looking like ATI can't cut it, mostly due to driver issues under linux.

Also I had to softlink libdb-4.2.so into the SecondLife_1_9_0_17/lib directory, but that's a minor issue I think.

Any suggestions or do I need to just suck it up and get a nVidea card?

Did you install ATI drivers? The basic drivers will work for graphics, but not 3D, need to add that to get games like SL to work.

I run Ubuntu Flight 5, and just installed the FGLRX drivers and was good to go, yes ATI is a little harder it seems to get working, but they do work.

ok I downloaded, installed and ran aticonf on the ATI driver for my video card and architecture (ATI9200, 64bit) followed by the recommended reboot. I went with a standard --initial config.

Now I cannot open the Graphics Card and Monitor option in Control Center, and connot open SaX2 (X11 config).

I do not see an option in the ATI Control to turn on 3D accelaration, and I don't see a specific line in xorg.conf like 3D=on.

So how exactly do I turn on 3D accelaration now with the control panel and SaX2 hosed? Or is there some other utility to manage the ATI driver settings? Or are there specific command line aticonfig options I need to run?

Thanks,

Sucking hard on a Radeon 9000 mobility...

For me I checked the xorg.0.log file to see if my video card was recongnized..as all distibutions did not reconginize it, unless i recompliled kernel, etc..but 2.6.15 finally did, and unbuntu as the easiest so went with that..(tried Fedora 5, but lockup issue with ati card right now, so went with ubuntu flight 5)

once it was recongnized I just download the fglrx drivers for ati cards..after that when I run fglrxinfo it says my card was seen and all is fine, and the xorg.conf was setup from that install.

So you sound like you are at where I was, that the linux kernal in suse is not seeing your video card, check the xorg.0.log file (in /var/log directory)..and see that you card is recongnized..

3D acceleration is always enabled with the ATi binary driver, therefore, SaX2 won't give you an option to "Enable" it, the checkbox is grayed out and it should (same for NVidia's binary drivers)
24 bit under Linux is the same as 32 under Windows; if you have 24 in Linux that means that's not the problem. You can make sure that's actually what you have using xdpyinfo
For SuSE don't just use the ATi installer to install the drivers, instead make a RPM using the installer, and then install that RPM using yast or rpm from the command line.
After that, log out of your user under X, go to a text console (using control+alt+F2), log in as root and type
init 3
(you may need to press control+alt+F2 again after it's done)
and then type

sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx -b /usr/share/doc/packages/fglrx/sax2-profile

reboot (for example by typing init 6) and you should be all set.

well I went through the procedure of creating the package (after installing kernel-source) and them installing the drivers with rpm -hiv

went throught the command line sax2 procedure and rebooted. The X is running but the SL client still fails to open with the Warning message about requiring 32 bit depth.

As far as I can tell the card is seen with the fglrxinfo as it returns info about OpenGL (unless there should be a specific line in the output for card model).

And also as far as I can tell from xdpyinfo, its at 24bit.

Not sure what to try next.

Any more ideas? Or should I start dumping logs and utility outputs up here?

Thanks

fglrxinfo should say something about ATi.
It should /not/ say anything about Mesa, if it says Mesa then it's not working

Ok then, it is still not seeing the card then as the output is referring to OpenGL and Mesa.

The kernel version is 2.6.13, so perhaps I could try updating the kernel to 2.6.15 which you had success with but I am not sure if Novell has it posted in the Yast patch system yet, I will have to check.

I was missing some of the 32 bit versions of the prereq for the ATI drivers.

Installed those, remade the package, reinstalled by rpm and ran the sax2 commands to configure it.

I now see the ATI Radeon entries in fglrxinfo.

I was able to start the client and log in, so this is the first hurtle cleared

The Advance Graphics in preferences shows only 16mb for Graphics Card Memory with all other options greyed out. So nothing is really rezzing in.

To set your video memory crrectly, please refer to Angel's Posting here:

/263/9c/86253/1.html

For ATi cards I was told *NOT* to activate AGP accelleration. Just to let you know, in case you experience low performance.