You have to add Option "DesktopSetup" "single" to your ati’s Device section in xorg.conf otherwise Xgl will think you’ve got two screens if you’ve got two adapters even if you just use one (which is the case with my Thinkpad) and will miserably fail on the second unattached screen.
Tag: ati
C&C 3 on Linux
I’ve got Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars running on my Gentoo Linux installation with wine 0.9.34 by following the instructions here. I had to first install it on windows though, and copy the folder for the installer didn’t work, even with Crossover Office.
Except for (very glitchly) video and sometimes a crash everything seems to run. (Didn’t try multiplayer yet though). I had to put all quality settings to lowest, which makes me wonder whether that is my radeon X1400 being not so good as I expected or wine just being slow in emulating Direct3D.
ati-drivers-8.33.6 for Gentoo
This is a slightly adjusted 25.3 ebuild that will give you the 8.33.6 ati-drivers for Gentoo. Yes, it’s dirty. They aren’t in the main tree yet because they are considered broken, although it works just fine for me.
Download: ati-drivers-overlay-8.33.6.tar.bz2
Extract them to an overlay.
Update, the 8.33.6 drivers are in the mainline tree now, so you should use those instead of mine.
Xgl
After a long night wrestling with alfa source code, I’ve managed to install Xgl.
Xgl is a Xorg-X11 layer that uses openGL to achieve some nice stunning effects.
One of these is to be able to switch desktops by pressing ‘Ctrl+Alt’ and dragging your desktop-cube.
There are a lot of other things that I can’t show with screenshots. Take a look at the Xgl release post. These things include that all forms behave flexible. If I drag a form it’s like it’s made of rubber instead of concrete. Also every form pops up gently animated. There’s also a mac osX expose-clone, which is really helpfull.
If you want to install it yourself then the gentoo wiki article and hanno’s blog post should be very helpful.
selfish driver control panels
A week ago my windows was agonizing slow. Starting up would take ages, and getting those ‘windows is out of virtual memory’ messages was common, so I decided to reinstall windows.
When reinstalled windows was using 120 mb without anything special installed.. so I started to install my usual application: apache, mysql, mssql.net express, php.. etc..
At the point I got those installed windows was using 250 mb instead of 120mb! msSQL server uses 50mb`s (although that number isn’t displayed in the task manager properly (i guess due to modules). MySQL and Apache both 25mb`s…
So I put the apache/sql servers services off by default and made a little bat script to start those when I want and put that one on my desktop. I also made a backup of windows so I didn’t need that horribly slow reinstall..
I installed some basic drivers via the provided driver cd’s loading a lot of junk like tray icons on my computer. They did not appear to use a lot of memory in the taskmanager but when quiting them it saved 100 mb :-/. 100mb used by selfish driver control panels thinking they are the single-most-used application and the only one sucking that amount of memory…
So instead of using those horrible flashy flash autorun installers I let windows find the correct driver .inf files and install it.
This really saves a lot of performance.. (I’ve cut down my startup time by 4 times).
So, better let windows find the drivers you require on your driver cd’s instead of using those selfish flashy traybar spamming driver control panel installers.