Installing ATI Radeon drivers (gatos) for Linux / X11 4.3.0

My notebook got an ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 and it took me quite some time to get everything working, including OpenGL and all that stuff. Now everything is running fine and I think, it could be useful to give you some instructions for setting up your system, too.

Here we go

Once again, Sourceforge is your source of information. Get the following two files from the GATOS page:

ATI-4.3.0-10.i386.tar.gz
drm-kernel-1.100.0-10.tar.gz

Of course the version numbers could have changed when you're reading this, but I'll assume, that those tips are valid for some time

Okay, lets extract the archives:

# cd /usr/local/src
# mkdir gatos ; cd gatos
# tar xvfz drm-kernel-1.100.0-10.tar.gz
# tar xvfz ATI-4.3.0-10.i386.tar.gz

Next step: Compiling the kernel module.

# cd drm-kernel
# make -f Makefile.linux radeon.o
# mkdir /lib/modules/`uname -r`/gatos
# cp radeon.o /lib/modules/`uname -r`/gatos

A bit tricky: The last step is to replace the X11 modules, so that OpenGL is working:

# cd /usr/X11R6/lib
# tar -cvf X11modules-orig.tar ./modules
# cp X11modules-orig.tar /where/it/is/safe
# cd /usr/local/src/gatos/X11R6/lib/modules
# tar cvf - . | ( cd /usr/X11R6/lib/modules; tar -xvf - )

Puuuuh
You'll just have to assure to load the radeon.o module before X11 startup. I added this line at the end (before ": exit 0") of my /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh:

insmod /lib/modules/`uname -r`/gatos/radeon.o

Make sure, your XF86Config-4 has the correct values and options (driver is ati, not radeon!). Here are mine:

Section "Module"
Load "GLcore"
Load "bitmap"
Load "dbe"
Load "ddc"
Load "dri"
Load "extmod"
Load "freetype"
Load "glx"
Load "int10"
Load "record"
Load "speedo"
Load "type1"
Load "vbe"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Generic Video Card"
Driver "ati"
EndSection

Done.

Have fun,
muesli