I haven’t really done my homework on this one, but I know from experience that the driver for a lot of older ATI cards, including the Rage Mobility M card in my rtorrent slave, is no longer included in the ati driver package for xorg.
It’s now in the mach64 driver, which isn’t difficult to figure out since the error message from X when you try the ati driver is, “Failed to load module “mach64″ (module does not exist, 0)”.
I know it’s been this way for a long time, because I can remember this happening when I installed Arch on that machine, quite a few months ago. Of course I never updated that machine in Arch, so it doesn’t surprise me that I didn’t trip up on that changeover. That’s me again, late to the party.
But you never know when you’ll stumble across one of those old ATIs. That card is very similar to the one in my old Dell CPx J750GT laptop, and I know it appears in a lot of other laptops too. It’s a decent card, with pretty good graphics for its age. If you find one, don’t turn it down.
Thanks for the heads up.
I’ve got such a card in my old laptop, which is also running Arch, but hasn’t been update in a long while.
it used to be you had to recompile xorg-video-ati with support for the mach64 card. you also had to recompile the drm drivers for x and libdrm. there are pkgbuilds in the aur for all that.
it’s no longer necessary as of (iirc) xorg-server-1.5.3. now there’s the xf86-video-mach64 package.
however, the mach64 drm module is not build by/in the mainline kernel, so it requires building from the mesa tree. there’s an aur PKGBUILD for it, but the mesa drm is no longer compatible with the kernel drm, so you’ll have to disable drm in the kernel and recompile if you want dri support for the mach64.
what a fricking headache.
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