[vox-tech] What's needed for 3D support?

[Peter Jay Salzman]

begin Rod Roark <rod@sunsetsystems.com> 
> On Thursday 20 June 2002 03:25 pm, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> > the linux gamers' howto might be helpful.   :-)
> 
> Well it's nice to have the author right here.  :-)
>
> > in startx 2>X.err make sure the DRI is enabled.  it probably isn't.
> > try to find a line beginning with (WW) or (EE) that gives a clue why it
> > isn't being started.
> 
> OK sure enough it wasn't.  After I figured out that the 
> relevant messages are in /var/log/XFree86.0.log,

sorry.  i should've mentioned the location.

> I then learned that I needed to run at 16-bit color depth,

yep.  i think i mention this in the howto.  voodoo acceleration happens
only at 16 bpp.

> and also Load "dri" in XF86Config.  That gets me this in the
> log file:
> 
>   (II) TDFX(0): [DRI] installation complete
>   (==) TDFX(0): Direct rendering enabled

great!

> That's the good news.  The bad news is, it didn't make 
> any noticable difference for either tuxracer or billardgl,
> even running as root.  They are still slower than snails 
> on ice.   :-(
>  
> One more data point.  Doing the strace on tuxracer, I see that
> it's looking for /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri/tdfx_dri.so which
> does not exist.  There are several other *_dri.so's in there,
> but tdfx is not one of them.
> 
> Any other thoughts appreciated....
 
aha.  strace is one of my favorite tools.

as you know, mesa is an implementation of of opengl.  they don't really
write mesa with backends for cards that require DRI for 3d rendering.
these days, xfree86 does that.

xfree86 maintains it's own implementation of mesa (which gets resynced
with mesa every so often).  this is the library you need, and this is
the library you're missing.

in debian, this library is packaged as "xlibmesa".  i don't know what
gentoo (mandrake?  what distro are you using for this machine?).

i guess the *short* answer is "install whatever package provides
tdfx_dri.o".   the longer answer is "install the mesa library that
uses DRI for hardware acceleration that's written by xfree86".

pete