Newbie: ATI Drivers - where to start..?

From: BulletProofPoet (no.mail_at_nowhere.com)
Date: 02/27/05 

Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 10:18:03 GMT

Hi Folks

First off, I'm a newbie to Linux, so any advice would be greatly
appreciated.

Secondly, I don't want to sound like I'm laying down the law, but please
can we avoid this thread turning into an ATI vs nVidia thread? I've
looked for help elsewhere and all discussion seems to invariably turn
into "you should have bought an nVidia card". I've read the agruments,
but the fact is that I have an ATI card and I'm *not* going to change
it. I'd just like to get it to work better under Suse if I can. I'm
trying to dump Windows altogether, which I think we'll all agree is the
right way to go!

Ideally, I want to play a bit of Neverwinter Nights, and I think that I
need to get the 3d acceleration working, as it runs like a dog under
whatever drivers Suse has installed by default.

My setup is a vanilla Suse 9.2 Pro installation on an Athlon 2800+. My
graphics card is an ATI Radeon 9600 with 256mb onboard RAM.

I've been to the ATI drivers site and am faced with a choice of four
drivers - three for XFree86 and one for XOrg. I've tried to run their
"Check.sh" script (to see which version of XFree86 I've got)
unsuccessfully. I've also checked in YAST to see what's been installed
in the Package Manager and found no mention of XFree86. There seem to
ba a number of XOrg 6.8.x packages installed though, so I'm assuming
that that is what I have. How can I confirm this?

Is it then a simple case of installing the drivers with the Package
Manager? What do I do if things go wrong? As I said, I'm a Linux
newbie, so I'm not all that familiar with it yet. If something goes
wrong, how do I revert back to the old drivers?

Also, I've heard of some Suse ATI drivers, but haven't been able to find
them in the Package Manager. Where can I find these and are they likely
to be any better than the ones on the ATI site (which I notice were only
updated a couple of weeks ago)?

Thanks for any advice given. Alternatively, if there's a good beginners
resource out there that could help to answer my questions about XOrg and
XFree86 (what are they?, what do they do?, how do I upgrade them?, etc)
I'd be pleased to read it.

Thanks again,

BPP

Relevant Pages

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