Unable to get dri enabled

[Janne Jokitalo]

Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
>> I've been trying to enable direct rendering, but so far 
>> nothing works. 
>> ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R250 Lf [FireGL 9000] (rev 02)
>> My system is:
>> Linux jjod600n 2.6.15-23-686 #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue May 23 
>> So, does anyone have any clue to what goes wrong in my 
>> system? I'd appreciate all hints and tips. Thanks a lot in 
>> advance! :)
> 
> The other day a similar thread came up, and apparently it turns out that
> the problem is that ATI pretty much purposefully obsoleted many "old"
> cards... artificial hardware regressions built-in to force you to buy a
> newer card.... what else :-/
> My card (Radeon 9250 Pro), suffers this regression, so I too am unable
> to use the fglrx driver... :-/

Thanks Vince, for taking the time to write about this problem! I've now
found a solution for my system. I cannot imagine how I had missed this tool
during all of my searching, but take a look at what this revealed:

jaska at jjod600n:~$ LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo
name of display: :0.0
libGL: XF86DRIGetClientDriverName: 8.25.18 atiogl_a (screen 0)
libGL: OpenDriver: trying /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri//atiogl_a_dri.so
libGL error: dlopen /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri//atiogl_a_dri.so failed
(/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri//atiogl_a_dri.so: cannot open shared object
file: No such file or directory)
libGL error: unable to find driver: atiogl_a_dri.so
libGL: XF86DRIGetClientDriverName: 8.25.18 atiogl_a (screen 0)
libGL: OpenDriver: trying /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri//atiogl_a_dri.so
libGL error: dlopen /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri//atiogl_a_dri.so failed
(/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri//atiogl_a_dri.so: cannot open shared object
file: No such file or directory)
libGL error: unable to find driver: atiogl_a_dri.so

So, I do this:

jaska at jjod600n:~$ find /usr -name ati*.so
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/ati_drv.so
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/atimisc_drv.so
/usr/lib/dri/atiogl_a_dri.so
/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/ati_drv.so

and notice that indeed, the atiogl_a_dri.so driver isn't where Xorg is
looking for it. So simply:

jaska at jjod600n:/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri$ sudo cp
/usr/lib/dri/atiogl_a_dri.so ./

was all it took to get:

jaska at jjod600n:~$ fglrxinfo
display: :0.0  screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: MOBILITY/RADEON 9000 DDR Generic
OpenGL version string: 1.3.1072 (X4.3.0-8.25.18)

Check it out if you have the same problem. Don't know if today's kernel
updates (along with restricted modules, naturally) made any difference.
Could be.

Thanks for everyone who helped in this fix!


-- 
Jaska