Delivery-Date: Thu Aug  1 12:02:00 2002
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 2002 14:48:34 -0400
From: Adam Kessel <adam@bostoncoop.net>
To: Omnibook Mailing List <omnibook@zurich.ai.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <20020801184834.GA759@joehill.neu.edu>
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Subject: [OmniBook] XVideo/DRI Acceleration on OB500
Sender: omnibook-admin@zurich.ai.mit.edu
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I've got both the xvideo and the dri 3d acceleration working on my OB500
running Debian unstable.

This means:

1) You can watch movies with mplayer or avifile-player without taking up all
your CPU cycles (even on the slower OB500/600 MHz).  

2) You can play OpenGL games or use 3d rendering applications, again at full
speed without using up your CPU. (a lot of OpenGL stuff is essentially
useless without 3d acceleration enabled). 

Since most people don't seem to be using these features, I thought it
would be useful to publicize. Both xvideo and dri make a huge difference
in the utility of your graphics card. Perhaps eventually experimental
Debian packages could be made available that provide a kernel and
xserver that have this functionality built in.  

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear possible to have *both* xvideo and dri
enabled simultaneously with the current state of the drivers.

Here's how to do it, under Debian:

Upgrade your xserver to 4.2.0. This is only available from an experimental
archive, currently. Add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list and
then apt-get upgrade:

deb ftp://ftp.cs.umn.edu/pub/debian-misc/branden/ sid/i386/

Download ATI-4.2.0-12.i386.tar.gz from gatos.sourceforge.net (or a more
recent version, if it is available):

http://unc.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gatos/ATI-4.2.0-12.i386.tar.gz

Download mach64-20020801-linux.i386.tar.bz2 from dri.sourceforge.net (or
more recent version).

http://dri.sourceforge.net/snapshots/bleeding-edge/r200-20020801-linux.i386.tar.bz2

To install xvideo drivers, unpack the ATI-4.2.0 file (tar xfz ATI-...), then
copy the contents of X11R6/lib into /usr/X11R6/lib (you probably ought to
back-up the original directory first).  

Restart the xserver.

To see if it works, try 'xvinfo'.  You should get something other than "no
adaptors present".

---

To install the dri 3d acceleration drivers, you'll need to have the
source code for your current kernel.  You should create a symbolic link
as follows: 

ln -s {directory where your kernel source is} /usr/src/linux 

Also, make sure your kernel is compiled with all the AGP options set to
Y, (CONFIG_AGP, etc..), and also with CONFIG_DRM_* set to 'y'.
Furthermore, make sure you've running the kernel which you have compiled
in that directory (otherwise you're likely to get a problem with
'modversions'h.) 

Then run install.sh in the directory where you unpacked
mach64-20020710-linux.i386.tar.bz2 (tar xfj mach64-...).  

You'll need to modprobe mach64 before starting the xserver to get 3d
acceleration to work.  Alternatively, add mach64 to /etc/modules so it
is loaded automatically.  

To see if it works, try 'glxinfo'. Where it says direct rendering: it should
say 'Yes'.

You can try adding Option "agpmode" "2" in the "device" section of your
XF86Config-4; this may make the 3d acceleration faster.  

---
I've made simple little shell scripts to switch back and forth between
xvideo extension and dri extension.

I hope this information is helpful to someone. Please let me know if it
doesn't work for you. I think it significantly enhances the utility of the
OB500, so this information should be better disseminated.
---
Adam Kessel (adam@bostoncoop.net)

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