Adventures in open source drivers.

Gentoo Linux .. Xorg 1.2 and open source ATI drivers

To make a long story short .. ATI dropping the support for many video cards
in their post 8.28.8 release has created a lot of trouble. It's been months now
that i had to apply a patch and edit an ebuild and copy over a file from kernel
sources to the next etc .. finally .. with xorg server 1.2 this is finally over .. no
way to have the drivers work .. no choice .. it's got to be open source drivers
or trash the card .. which i totally refuse to do. The 9250 is working well and
allows me to do all i need to .. So with the help of Nerdboy and FireCat .. i got
the courage and enough hints to go ahead and install them. It was more or less
painless .. They do work and acceleration does work. Most troubles are in the
configuration. There's many gotchas and i still have a lot to debug,

1 ) A shimmering effect as text is scrolling
2 ) The screen is covered with horizontal lines that more or less come and go
hard to describe .. it's like instead of smooth images and text .. it's all lines.
3 ) mplayer and related video players are out of sync ..
4 ) The video while playing ppracer ( tux racer ) is kind of choppy

So on and so forth .. nothing major.. openGL apps like BillardsGL works just
fine but all the same .. i will not stop until it's all fine.

For now ill simply lay down the configuration file in here and have a backup ; )

As the problems are solved .. ill add the posts .

A very accurate how-to ati open source drivers with acceleration for gentoo
is soon to follow .. wouldn't want anyone to blame me for an inaccurate
post