Radeon 8500 Compatability Check

[Mune]

I have redhat 8.0 and i know that 3d support for the Radeon 8500 is not supported.. is there anywhere i can look to see if it is in development or any way to get it working manually? thanks in advance.. :D

[bwkaz]

Actually, for X 4.2 and the 8500, ATI now has binary drivers on their site. I have no idea how well they work, though... you will probably need X 4.2, which I believe RH 8 provides anyway.

[gritseater]

The "www.DRI.org" (I think that is what it is) site has info. DRI stands for Direct Rendering Institute(?) which contributes to XFree86 (They have links to DRI on their website). DRI has some new drivers for the Radeon 8500, I'm not sure if they support all the features such as T&L, but they do support OpenGL and direct 3D. It involves some checking of your kernel modules, XFree configuration, and libraries installed (glibC 22 is needed but RH 8.0 has glibC 23- I couldn't get the driver to compile properly for me with glibC 23).

[twitch_boy]

Has anyone actually got either the ATI drivers or the dri.sourceforge.net drivers working with RH8??? I tried both and got errors compiling. I've searched everywhere for some information on this and have found nothing:confused:

[gritseater]

I'm not sure but I think the glibc 23 library causes the problems.According to DRI the glibc 22 libs are needed. I thought the newer libs would work but they don't. I contacted RedHat web support and basically they said the Radeon should work unless the PCI version is used. The XFree86.org site had a listing of the cards supported under 4.2 and there is an update 4.2.1 which may help.

[twitch_boy]

The card does work fine under RH8 however, there is no dri support. Also, I don't know if its just me but divx/dvd/mpg movies won't display for me at all :( 3D acceleration would be nice but all I want to do is watch some movies.

I read on another forum that the ATI drivers won't work because they weren't compiled with gcc3.2 (which RH8 uses) but the details were a little sketchy.