...I have a couple of problems Anyway, I just installed Linux yesterday, and it seems pretty nice so far. I had a couple problems getting my duel monitors working, but after a struggle with the XF86Config-4 settings, I got it working. So far, so good. Unfortunatly, I lost 3D acceleration in the process (ie: Chromium runs so slow as to be unplayable, whereas it used to work really well). So I had a look at the log file for XFree86, and I saw:

(WW) RADEON(0): Direct Rendering Disabled -- Dual-head configuration is not working with DRI at present.
Please use only one Device/Screen section in your XFConfig file.
 

Direct rendering means 3D acceleration, right? And Dual-head config is presumably referring to my 2 screen setup. As a test, I put the settings back to one-monitor mode (which means I have the same display on each screen), and 3D acceleration worked fine. So, my question is: Is there any way to have both 3D acceleration and dual-head displays at the same time? Or am I stuck in software? This setup worked fine under WinXP, btw Even getting 3D acceleration on one screen would be fine - I usually code on the second monitor, and test on the main one, so the most stressful thing the second screen would have to run would be whatever the VS.net equivlent in Linux is (KDevelop?) My specs: Mandrake 10.0 Dell i4150 laptop ATI Radeon 7500 32mb video (runs the LCD screen for laptop, and an external monitor) P4 1.8ghz 256mb RAM My site | Screenshot gallery | My forums

That would be an issue to take up with the writers of the driver you''re using, I''m assuming in this case it''s ATI. Of course, the drivers aren''t perfect in Windows either, but as an owner of a Radeon I too am disappointed at the apparently missing features of the Linux implementation.

If you find some sort of work-around, however, please post it!

quote: Original post by Bieh

...run would be whatever the VS.net equivlent in Linux is (KDevelop?)

My specs:
Mandrake 10.0
...

KDevelop 3.0 is a very good IDE but awfully buggy at the moment. Unfortunately Mandrake 10 got released before a really stable version got out. I suggest you check www.kdevelop.org for a new version regularly. If you have 3.0 then you should at least get 3.0.2.

I only recently started using the KDevelop 3 series and haven''t had any problems at all with it (apart from finding certain project settings in the gui). This is version 3.2.0.

As for your Radeon driver, there was a new official ATI driver released a few days ago, see here, or you could try the DRI pages.

Unfortunatly, the ATI official drivers only support the r8500 and up, not my primitive r7500 (IIRC)

The DRI pages look interesting, though. I'll have a look through there tomorrow.

KDevelop looks pretty cool from the screenshots, too



My site | Screenshot gallery | My forums

[edited by - Bieh on March 15, 2004 4:54:05 AM]

A friend of mine once suggested to another friend to use one X server for each monitor, then tie the 2 together with a third X server.

I have no clue how the hell that would work, but you might find something.

It certainly may be possible to run two Xservers (thus allowing development on one, while running or debugging on the other, just fiddle with the DISPLAY environment variable before running your game) one on each.

but... tying them together with a third? your friend is nuts.

quote: Original post by Bieh

Dual-head configuration is not working with DRI at present. 

This is the big clue. The drivers don''t support it yet. You''ll have to bug whoever made that driver to fix it (or implement it yourself).

DRI != Hardware Acceleration. XV (x video?) is also another method that works fast and renders pretty much directly to the screen. The only reason I say "pretty much" is because I don''t know for sure, but I know it uses hardware accleration at least to render video using mplayer. As far as I know (using gentoo), the ATI drivers never work nicely when you have DRI support in the kernel. From what I know you don''t want this in your kernel, and you want to install ati-drivers on your system, then switch the opengl interface to firegl. Running fgl_glxgears and glxgears are good measures to know if you are getting hardware acceleration. Check forums of sites to see if your frame rates are up to par for hardware acceleration.

why DRI? like said, DRI is not acceleration. Just config your box without DRI support (especially compile it out of the kernel and xfree) and then modify the config file to not use DRI (take out the load dri line). This should do the trick.