News from the ATI front.

Great news. Today was released for our great enjoyment the latest
installment of the 8.28.8 driver series on Gentoo.
May i present ati-drivers-8.28.8-r1 . ( insert canned applause and praise here )

First trick is to lock in the ati-drivers version.I did the following
In /etc/portage i edited the package.mask and added the following line :

>x11-drivers/ati-drivers-8.28.8-r1

saved and exited.

Ok i was mad at first cause it didnt seem to compile with the 2.6.20 kernel.
But , not being one that shy away at the first bump in the road .. i kept looking
and found the way to make it compile.

There is a new patch file for the 2.6.20 kernel and the ebuild was calling for the
2.6.19 patch .. in the ebuild i went :

open a terminal :

cd /usr/portage/x11-drivers/ati-drivers/files
ls

you should see the ati-drivers-2.6.20.patch.
If it's there then we
cd ..
nano ati-drivers-8.28.8-r1.ebuild

in there search for this section :

epatch "${FILESDIR}/${P}-linux-2.6.18.patch"
epatch "${FILESDIR}/ati-drivers-2.6.19.patch"

AH HA ! there it was .. we need to mod this to be

epatch "${FILESDIR}/ati-drivers-2.6.20.patch"

save and exit

Now we have to

ebuild ati-drivers-8.28.8-r1.ebuild digest

Then emerge the drivers like usual

emerge ati-drivers

That should do it :)

Now for post 2.6.20 kernels .. i was able to build the drivers for the more recent
2.6.21-r3 kernel without much trouble afterwards. all i had to do was copy over
the linux/config.h from an older kernel over to the newer one like so :

cp /usr/src/linux-2.6.19-gentoo-r5/include/linux/config.h /usr/src/linux-2.6.21-gentoo-r3/include/linux/config.h

Don't know how this will look .. but it's all on one line :)

Then i just emerge ati-drivers and i had a few warnings but the drivers work.

Happy hacking