[linrad] Svgalib and the Radeon chipset

[Alberto di Bene <dibene@xxxxxxx>]

 you might be interested in the results of my attempt to have Svgalib 
1.9.19
running on my Hercules 3D Prophet 9000 card, based on the ATI Radeon
9000 chipset.  Here is the story (with an happy end...)

First of all, the choice of Linux distribution. I tried first with 
Mandrake 10.0,
then Mandrake 10.1, and each time I got errors during the make process.
Some of them I have been told can be corrected by simply moving things
from a directory to another. Maybe, but I spent so many hours doing
experiments that I was almost on the point of forgetting all the whole 
stuff.
Then I read on this group that Fedora Core 3 had given good results, so
I downloaded the ISO images of the three CDs and installed it.
Surprise, Svgalib installed without a glitch, and the make went smooth with
the default makefile.  But Svgalib didn't wotk.... letting it autodetect the
chipset resulted in the error message (when launching vgatest) :

svgalib: Rage driver was needed, but not found

Following a suggestion by Jeffrey Pawlan I tried to force the VESA driver,
which made that error disappear, but vgatest did not run correctly.
Then I wrote to Matan, the maintainer of svgalib, and sent him a dump of the
configuration of my PC. He told me that svgalib 1.9.19 has a very limited
support for the Radeon family and that this will change with version 1.9.20
In the meantime he suggested me a very simple change in the autodetection
code, to make my card recognized. The PC ID of my card is 0x4966, which
escapes the range tested by the code. In module src/drivers/r128.c,
line 1330, he suggested me to change the original line :

((id>>8)==0x51))   into  ((id>>8)==0x49))

This hack makes all PC IDs starting with 0x49 as being recognized as Radeon
chipsets. I am sure that in version 1.9.20 this will be refined, but 
nevertheless
I recompiled the modified code, and... it worked !
So, if you have problems with your Radeon card, before throwing it out 
of the
window, try that mod.

73  Alberto  I2PHD








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