[NBLUG/talk] Direct Render Support

[Stephen Cilley]

Hello,
First off, my name is Stephen and last night was my
first meeting.  Thank you guys so much for doing all
of this, that was a lot of fun.  I learned a lot!
At Mary's afterward Aaron helped me out by showing me
some stuff on my laptop and told me to post one
particular error I had on the talk list, so here I am.
It goes like this: I'm running Ubuntu (BB) on my IBM
Thinkpad T22 which has got a video card called the S3
Savage IX-8 which is an AGP2x card with 8 megs of VRAM
and everything you'd expect with that generation of
video card.  The X.org driver seems to be working
alright but I've got no direct render support.  So I
need some help with that.
When I lspci it looks like this:
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc.
86C270-294 Savage/IX-MV (rev 13)
So I was so fired up last night thinking about what
Aaron had shown me that I spent about 3 hours last
night trying to do this myself (for the pride of it,
y'know.)  Mistake.  Unfortunately I don't even have
the knowledge to use what I've found online.  But I
have found stuff, and I was hoping maybe one of you
could explain to me what it means and how to use it.
Ok, what I found was that the only way to make the
direct render go (as far as I've seen) is with
something called "DRI" found at
http://dri.freedesktop.org
I tried installing one of their snapshots, but I'm
afraid I really have no idea what's going on.  It
looks like I get through the common portion of the
install alright, but when I get to the Savage bit I
get some error about not having the kernel script. 
When I tried to work my way through their
troubleshooting section I couldn't get very far and I
don't really understand why.
Maybe all of that isn't very useful, but I did find
two success stories that probably will be:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/dri-howto.xml (I don't
understand a lot of what they're saying! "ls -l
/usr/src/linux" doesn't give me the result they seem
to be expecting.)
and
http://probo.probo.com/pipermail/savage40/2004-November/thread.html#169
(second thread titled "What am I missing?" is followed
through until the device is working, but again I just
don't understand what they're talking about.)
So it would be great if any of you could give me some
guidance.  I really appreciate everything you guys do.
 Next months meeting looks like something I'll
understand a lot more easily. ^_^
Thank you,
Stephen Cilley


		
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