I recently installed Mandrake 9.1 on my system in dual boot with Win XP. MAndrake linux distro is great but there are a few problems the most important for me is that the 3d acceleration is awful... I looked around on forums and the more I read the more confused I got... I'm really frustrated because any game running in 3d runs at 2 fps... I'm using a radeon 8500 128mb LE from hercules and I was wondering whether anyone could give me detailed instructions on how to fix this... any help would be much appreciated by a student who wants to convert to Linux THX!!!

(On a side note my sound card doesn't work but I think that's because my mobo sound card is activated and it's conflicting with my sound blaster audigy player 1024... any idea for a solution?)

About your videocard: I don't know. I've a radeon 9000, and im already messing around for almost 2 weaks to get the 3d acceleration to work, without success.

About your soundcard: I got almost the same here; i just disabled the onboard soundcard in the bios setup program.

If thats out of the question, you could also remove the support for that onboard soundcard (takes a kernel recompile, i think)

The FireGL driver could work but mind you it is still in beta:

http://www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_ati.html

And you need to apply patch to enable AGP 8X if you use KT400/600 chipset or nForce2.

Once Kernel 2.6 comes out the AGP 8X problem would probably go away.

Well, I've tryed the FireGL driver from ATI: it worked for me, but without 3d acceleration, and the screen gets messed up after a while.
The fireGL driver from schneider worked better, but still no acceleration.
I also tryed the DRI stuff whit the kernel radeon driver. Haven't got this to work (yet). It keeps messing around whit DRI or DRM errors. Most of it was about to old versions, so I think kernel 2.6 should fix all of this.

I also read something about galeon(or something like that), which should be another driver for ATI boards. I haven't tryed thatone yet.

When I do get something to work, I let you know.

You can an little older version that is on Ati's web site, you need to choose the FireGL 8800 drivers.

The version is 2.9.13 while on schneider-digital, you can get 3.0.2-3 I think.

the latest version doesnt work well with UT2003 (artifacts) while th older one freeze under RTCW : ET

I use RH 9.0

also both wont work at 640x480 and 800x600