i describe here a problem i am faced with for the last one or two years or so, but now, using the newest Slackware distribution, the issue STILL persists, and i consider buying new hardware for that reason:

how do i get these ass Ati FireGL cards working with Slackware v12 and kernel 2.6.21.5 ? i use on several SuperMicro workstations the following FireGL cards: Z1-128,T2-128, V3100 and V3400, and NOT ONE IS WORKING ====> screen turn black after starting X !!!!!. i cannot install Ati's proprietary drivers (8.35.5) because they don't support X v7.2 currently. but unfortunately also the 'ati' = 'radeon' drivers do not work either. switching between xf86-video-ati-6.6.192 and xf86-video-ati-6.6.3 doesn't change much. screen blanks, till the next reboot of the machine! the 'vesa' driver at least works, but at a shitty resolution of 1024x768 i believe. all workstation have digital-DVI LCD screens attached with 1600x1200 pixels or greater.

what to do ? buying Nvidia ?

bye, pisti

They do not support X7.2? But I installed them with X 7.3 on Suse several months ago??? Did you at least give it a try?

That being said, I recently switched to Nvidia myself. It wasn't so much the Linux part that put me off - although that played a role as well. It was the absence of any FreeBSD/Solaris drivers, especially after ATI made it clear once more that us folks shouldn't expect anything like that from them. Plus their refusal to work with the open source community even after promising they would. Still, Nvidia isn't perfect either. Guess what I ran into after installing FreeBSD? Yes, a blank screen... I was able to stretch it out in the end but it was a bit of a shock, of course.

i thought that X 7.2 is the newest version available from X.org, am i wrong? in any case, that's the version slackware 12.0 comes with, while i need to go with slack for various reasons.

you are right, when Ati was still supporting X, then things worked much better, like framebuffer, switching between Xs, or between X and terminal mode, and such. but later Ati began with that proprietary attitude again...

No, Xorg 7.3 is the latest. It was in its last beta stages when I installed it a month or two ago. It worked fine with the fglrx driver, though. glxgears gave me about 25% fewer FPS than usual but that wasn't really noticeable in real world situations.

I guess it's the Slackware/ATI combination that is causing the trouble. I nearly pulled my hair out trying to install fglrx on Gentoo, same story...