new install vl 5.9 gold, Radeon 9200, fglrx can't be found

[twoten]

I just upgraded from soho 5.8. The installer says it will install fglrx but it's version 8.42.3, and I happen to know that 8.28.8 is the last version to support the 9200 card. So I select the opensource radeon driver, the install goes okay, and as root I can do a startx (but not as a user).

So I open a terminal window in Xfce, and run the ati 8.28 installer, but it says that XFree86 can't be found in the path, and "X server: unable to detect" and it's game over.

Am I any closer to getting fglrx installed? I'm valiantly sticking with Vector but this is getting to be such a pain ...

[uelsk8s]

Here is the good news: You should have decent frame rates, and performance with the open source radeon driver.
The bad news: ATI does not make a proprietary driver that will work with your card+the kernel and Xorg in 5.9

[twoten]

Oh darn! Well that does it then, I'm going to bid on that nVidia 7600 on ebay!

[twoten]

I can run startx as root and end up in Xfce. But when run as a user startx bombs and says:

gpg-agent: error while loading shared libraries: libpth.so.20: cannot open shared object file

Sure enough, a "locate libpth.so.20" shows that it is not installed. I think I can live with this if I can startx as a user, but where do I find the missing object?

Also, would it make any difference if I switched to a different distro?

[uelsk8s]

Also, would it make any difference if I switched to a different distro?

I am assuming your asking if you can run the proprietary ATI driver for your card on another distro?
If so, you can as long as it uses an older version of X and an older kernel.
You could downgrade the kernel and Xorg on vl and get the driver to work, but it would be a lot more work than getting an nvidia card or newer ATI card.
I have an ATI X1300 that works great, but nvidia supports just about all there old cards I even have a tnt2 card that works with the latest kernel and xorg.

[uelsk8s]

you can get the pth package here: http://lmlinux.com/distros/slackware/slackware-12.0/slackware/n/pth-2.0.7-i486-1.tgz

[GrannyGeek]

I have a Radeon 9200 and it's doing pretty well with the xorg radeon driver. The ATI proprietary driver won't work on 5.9. I'm getting pretty good performance in PPRacer with the xorg radeon driver, that is, I get dizzy when Tux goes down the hill.<g>

No problems starting as user. Alas, I don't know what you can do to make it work.
--GrannyGeek

[twoten]

Well this is weird, after reading your encouraging words here last night I decided to give it more try. So I switched my box on this morning and everything just worked. It autologged me in as a user, ppracer played totally smooth, and glxgears reported 2242 fps. On soho 5.8 the best I got was 118 fps. So I guess all it took was a power down reset. Unless, some vector white hatter hacked into my machine during the night and fixed it ... hmmm ...

I'm a staunch kde user but Xfce seems to do everything I need, so this is a happy day. My experience with vector is that I came for the attitude and stayed for the performance!